Invisible Digital: What Animation and Games Tell Us about Software and Digital Culture 9781501390883, 1501390880

Table of contents :
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The context and approach of Invisible Digital
Production assemblages and their relationality
Starting with software
The shape of Invisible Digital
Chapter 1: What does water look like?
Water in moving images
TV documentaries and VFX oceans
Animated oceans
Thinking about software
Where it all started
Conclusion
Chapter 2: Making waves
Moana and its pipeline
Introducing performativity and software
Performing waves and performative Splash
Moana and a culture of connectivity
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Generating places
Procedural games
Approaching No Man’s Sky
Relationality
No Man’s Sky and its emergent boundary conditions
Noise and landscape
Conclusion
Chapter 4: What connects?
Introducing Everything
Connectivity is the game
Hybrid connections
Unity and autoplay in action
Conclusion
Conclusion
Going Inside Out
Starting with the familiar: mapping the human
Moving outside the familiar: Mapping the digital
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Invisible Digital

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Invisible Digital What Animation and Games Tell Us about Software and Digital Culture Aylish Wood

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2024 Copyright © Aylish Wood, 2024 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover image © Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-9090-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-9088-3 eBook: 978-1-5013-9089-0 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction

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1 2 3 4

What does water look like? Making waves Generating places What connects?

15 49 89 133

Conclusion

163

Bibliography Index

171 188

Acknowledgements Writing a book never takes place in a vacuum. The process draws on feedback and encouragement from all the people with whom we share our ideas: friends and colleagues, people at conference events, through presentations to willing and even unwilling audiences, also the editorial team at Bloomsbury and the insightful reviewers of the draft manuscript. Feedback from all these various people has helped me shape my thinking from its early and tentative stages, through to sections that became something else, and ultimately the ideas which made the final version of Invisible Digital. Thank you all, your thoughts and comments were invaluable and encouraged me forward. Writing also takes place in a personal space, where the intricacies of a sentence compete with life and everything that is happening in the world. Thank you ‘Familia’ for keeping me grounded and making me laugh, and Renee Stafford for her support and encouragement. Finally, Invisible Digital is dedicated to Jean who brings joy, a precious thing to have in life.

Introduction

Why use the term invisible when writing about images we can see on our screens? Because visible images, well as enjoyable in their own right, provide a starting point for exploring the materiality and culture of digital processes, what I call invisible digital. With the rise of ‘making of ’ materials and readily accessible practitioner interviews over the last two decades, we are by now very familiar with explanations about how digital images are created by teams of VFX artists and game designers. The narratives of image-making production culture often start from claims about the latest software developments and what these add to production processes. These explanations can also reveal how our understandings of software are mediated through the cultural and technological influences surrounding and produced by software. My purpose with Invisible Digital is to examine digital processes via the imagery they produce and how our understanding of digital processes emerges through an interplay of cultural and technological mediations. Although my main emphasis is on software used in moving image production, I also make a broader point: production culture around software, whether for VFX, animation or games, reiterates and contributes to a circulation of ideas associated more widely with digital processes. For Invisible Digital I combine analyses of animated images in feature animations and games, primarily the Disney production Moana (2016) and the computer games No Man’s Sky (2016–) and Everything (2017), with an analysis of publicity and marketing materials relating to their production. My reason for bringing together this particular range of examples was the use of procedural systems during their production. Moana relies on procedural animation for the simulation of water and No Man’s Sky and Everything for the generation of landscapes. All animation software involves some degree of automation by virtue of being a computational process. But in the context of a production using procedural animation software, automation re-scales a production process and in the case of Moana, No Man’s Sky and Everything, software is brought into the foreground of production culture disclosures.

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Invisible Digital

The context and approach of Invisible Digital Analysing publicity and marketing materials is an approach associated with production studies. Production studies is a long-standing presence within media studies and film studies.1 As it exists at the beginning of the 2020s, production studies is both a multi- and interdisciplinary approach, of which Sarah Atkinson notes: Studies of production have been undertaken by scholars within sociology, management studies, business studies, organization studies, economics, cultural policy and arts management studies, and cultural studies, but it has only recently been acknowledged as a significant, legitimate and growing field of enquiry in film and media studies and its attendant methods have been validated. (2018: 9)

With studies of production ranging across many fields, scholars have drawn on numerous methodologies which include ethnographic as well as economic analyses, for instance, interview-based studies of a studio or individual productions of a TV show or film (Mayer, Banks and Caldwell 2009; Banks, Conor and Mayer 2015). They can also include labour studies, which is of particular relevance to the contemporary VFX industry where workers have often been subject to exploitative and precarious practices (Curtin and Sanson 2016). My approach with Invisible Digital is to treat production culture disclosures not only as giving insight into the working practices of a studio producing a particular film or game but also as expressions of the cultural and technological mediations surrounding digital processes. Within the cinema and games industries, any production, especially those taking place at a large studio, involves marketing. This is not a new phenomenon, though prevailing marketing practices have changed in line with the transformation of technologies for the publication and sharing of production materials. From print-based strategies such as papers, general circulation and fan magazines, and image-based strategies including posters and trailers, the latter first in cinemas, then TV, videos and DVDs, marketing now utilizes a wide diversity of media types. In the contemporary era, a film or game’s pre-release and release are accompanied by printed or filmed secondary textual material such as previews, trailers, posters, director commentaries and ‘making ofs’ (Kernan 2009). Director commentaries and ‘making ofs’ first circulated through DVDs feeding into cinephile home viewing (Klinger 2008), and these commentaries continue to be available via Blu-Rays and download services.

Introduction

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These materials have been joined by internet publications, which feature further interviews with a range of production personnel and descriptions of various features of a production such as costumes, set design, music and the approach an actor has taken to their role. When a film’s publicity involves an emphasis on VFX work, their release comes with numerous interviews with key VFX personnel. Most often these are above-the-line figures such as animation or visual effects supervisors, Heads of Departments of Animation, VFX or Technical Directors, a game designer or software designer. These kinds of interviews can typically be found in online magazines including fxguide, Wired, Animation World Network, Computer Graphics World, Cinema Blend, Studio Daily and also publications such as Variety, Vanity Fair and The Atlantic, many of which I have accessed for this study. All of these materials add further dimensions to the information we draw on to make sense of the imagery seen or heard in a film or game. Calling these materials paratexts, Jonathan Gray suggests they ‘change the nature of the text’s address, each proliferation either amplifying an aspect of the text through its mass circulation or adding something new and different to the text’ (2010: 2). For productions relying on VFX such amplifications typically invoke the constant of technologically driven innovation. When associated with studio identity these amplifications operate as what John T. Caldwell refers to as ‘sanctioned corporate disclosures’ (2009: 169). This is true of animations produced at Pixar and Disney, where paratexts associated with a range of animated features and shorts are often aligned with claims about powerful and innovative digital tool sets (Telotte 2008; Price 2009). The release of the Oscarwinning short Piper (2016), for instance, was marketed alongside the rendering technology of the Rix Integration Subsystem (RIS), at the time a newly designed addition to Pixar’s RenderMan (Pedersen 2017). Pixar and Disney consistently use marketing materials to place themselves at the leading edge of innovation. By incorporating these alignments into production disclosures, the companies define themselves within the industry, adding to both their internal and external cultural significance. Like Pixar and Disney, VFX practices in particular ‘invoke modernist notions of “cutting-edge” originality, innovation, and radicality to promote progress in their respective industries’ (Caldwell 2008: 149). As Lisa Purse suggests, the amplification of attention to VFX may mean other aspects of a film or animation get overlooked: Caught up in the paratextual ‘real story’ of a movie’s technological sophistication provided by promotional materials, which itself draws on a utopian cultural

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Invisible Digital conception of digitally enabled technological empowerment, the spectator is much less likely to closely ponder the mechanics – and politics – of the film’s representational dynamics and visual narration. (2013: 26)

Caldwell argues further that both scholars and viewers must pass through paratexts to get to the primary texts, and these are what he calls part of a paraindustry: Specifically, an economic and cultural–industrial interface woven together by socio-professional media communities, through trade narratives, ritualized interactions and conventionalized self-representations that viewers and scholars must wade through before they can find a primary text or featured on-screen content. Thus, para-texts are indeed a part – but only a subset – of a broader cultural–industrial interface, a para-industry that bounds and embeds within itself most commercial media texts. (2014: 721)

Acknowledging the wider economic and cultural-industrial interface inhabited by media communities, viewers and scholars alike, production culture studies takes into account that the ideas flowing across paratexts are already a site of negotiation between different interest groups. They are not neutral explanations but have been scripted and mediated before readers, whether as general audiences or scholars, get to them. Keeping in mind that production culture is scripted and mediated, marketing and publicity materials for animations and games provide descriptions about the creation of imagery for an animated feature or a game. These can be analysed as narratives formed as a consequence of negotiations amongst different interest groups. As such the materials do not just frame our engagement with on-screen images, they exist as a meeting point of social, cultural and organizational influences. While some of these can indeed distract us from the representational dynamics of a film as Purse suggests, analysing paratexts further allows us also to unpack their impacts on our engagement with the wider production of a film or game. Such analyses let us consider why some aspects of a production are amplified over others. For instance, my discussion of the Disney feature animation Moana interrogates how the seemingly straightforward notion of ‘realisticness’ frames descriptions of water simulations. My analysis considers the amplification of a notion of realisticness across reviews of the animation, VFX practitioner interviews, as well as software design. While my touchstone remains the images on the screen I engage too with this heterogenous mix of publicity and marketing materials.

Introduction

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My interrogation reveals how the screen versions of a visually familiar feature such as water are not simply works of mimicry, and that what we take to be realistic is shaped by both cultural expectations and also technological mediations.

Production assemblages and their relationality Paying attention to how technologies mediate and contribute to a production culture narrative is central to Invisible Digital. Broadly speaking, any production is an extended and heterogeneous space. It consists of personnel, organizational and industrial systems, practices relating to the specific expertise of different departments involved in a production, numerous types of technologies including software, as well as the conceptual frames of the cultural, social, legal and economic worlds that infuse and delimit the situation of a production. Writing about games T. L. Taylor uses the term assemblage to describe the range of elements with potential to contribute to a situation of production and play (2009). Taking this idea to the video game No Man’s Sky, for instance, its assemblage would include the original version of the game (and then all its upgrades and new releases), Hello Games, the studio that produced the game, the team of programmers and designers and the game’s director, Sean Murray. As I explore in Chapter 3, it would also take in Sony, who formed a partnership with Hello Games, the games marketing events to which this partnership gave access. It would further encompass many technologies but especially the procedural software behind the game. The idea of an assemblage is helpful in the approach I take for Invisible Digital, and even though widely used, a definitive explanation of assemblages proves hard to find. The term was introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (2013). Writing in Assemblage Theory, Manuel DeLanda notes that Deleuze and Guattari describe assemblages in different ways, leading to some opacity in the details of their meaning (2015a). As a starting point for understanding assemblages, DeLanda quotes Deleuze’s following description: What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never filiations which are

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Invisible Digital important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 69)

DeLanda describes how the term assemblage combines two ideas, only one of which translates from the French word agencement into the English word assemblage. The facet that translates is straightforward: an ensemble of parts that mesh together well. Understood in this way, an assemblage is a collection of entities that cohere into a functioning unit. Lost in this translation are the more contingent and fluid actions and processes of an assemblage, the ‘action of matching or fitting together a set of components’ (DeLanda 2015a: 1). As Delanda puts it, relations between entities make connections: ‘It is a relation established between the two groups, like the air that exists between them transmitting influences that connect them but do not constitute them’ (2015a: 2). The importance of this second dimension of agencement is that it introduces the action of relationality, of things coming together and parting to an otherwise static understanding of the term assemblage. Since relationality is central to Invisible Digital I expand some more on the concept. Relationality and relational theories understand entities, whether human or non-human, to be meaningful through their relations to other entities. Though not widely used in film and animation studies, both areas are beginning to pick up on relational theory. For instance, Lilly Husbands has written about David Theobald’s animation through the lens of speculative realism, arguing that Theobald’s emphasis on seemingly peripheral objects allows his experimental animations to be encountered as ‘being in dialogue with a kind of post-humanist, ecophilosophical ethics’ (2014). Elizabeth Ezra works with relational theory to write about how cinema depicts post-humanist experiences through the proliferation of objects, their growing autonomy and a dissipation of the boundaries of human bodies (2017). These two works draw on the idea that humans are relational. That is, we exist as intricate meshworks of transforming connections running between everyone and everything, whether human and non-human, animate or inanimate. I apply this idea to on-screen entities and the context within images are created, the production assemblages. In relational theory, objects, whether human or non-human, never stand alone or exist autonomously; instead, they co-exist and co-produce. For example, humans and technologies make a difference to a production and co-produce through the combination of the affordances of technologies and their relations with the artists using the technology. This statement brings another facet of an

Introduction

7

assemblage into view. All entities within an assemblage have the capacity to influence, whether human or technological. That is, all entities are agents in the sense of having the facility to intervene in the flow of actions and meaning. This idea is an important one for my analysis: technology influences and part of the work of Invisible Digital is to explore how theses influences are manifest in production culture disclosures and the entities visible on screen. There are already a range of perspectives on the agency of objects, many of which aim to displace human agency as the only point from which a situation can be influenced. Materialists Diane Coole and Samantha Frost, for instance, argue that objects displace humans as the central pivot around whom agency traverses: Conceiving of matter as possessing its own modes of self-transformation, selforganisation, and directness, and thus no longer as simply passive or inert, disturbs the conventional sense that agents are exclusively humans who possess cognitive abilities, intentionality, and freedom to make autonomous decisions and the corollary presumption that humans have the right or ability to master nature. (Coole and Frost 2010: 10)

Displacing humans as the only source of agency is fundamental to materialism, which sees the world and all its inhabitants as relational. Making this claim relies on seeing that objects have agency in the sense they have the capacity to make a difference to a situation. The idea that objects have agency is shared across different theoretical approaches, from materialism and new-materialism as well as object-oriented philosophy. An emphasis on objects and materialism can be found in ActorNetwork-Theory (ANT) where scholars have long been interested in the roles played by objects in the production of knowledge (Latour 2005; Blok, Farìas and Roberts 2019). More recently anthropology, post-humanist approaches and ecocriticism have too sought to account for objects in the ways social, cultural and political conditions and actions play out in the world (Braidotti 2018). Although often distinct in terms of focus, the approaches of ANT, anthropology, post-humanism and ecocriticism share an emphasis on relationalities between human and non-human objects in the generation of politics, culture, meaning, action. Object-oriented ontologies (OOO) by contrast take a different approach. Often critical of materialism because the latter sees objects primarily in terms of their actual relations with humans, OOO has introduced the idea of virtual relations through speculative realism (Bogost 2012; Harman 2016). Ian Bogost in

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Alien Phenomenology argues that it is important to respect things in themselves (2012). For Bogost respecting things in themselves requires a move away from anthropocentric ideas that he argues remain embedded in discussions of humanobject relations to instead gain a comprehension of object-object relations. With Invisible Digital my focus remains on relations between humans and nonhuman objects since analysing interactions between humans and technologies are a part of my narrative. Relying on an analysis of production culture, I explore production disclosures as narratives articulating how human and non-human entities both together participate in an assemblage generating action and meaning. In this process of analysis, I understand the contributions of humans and non-human objects to be always mediated by each other and caught up in an interplay of social, cultural and technological influences. When we say, for instance, that an image of simulated water is realistic, we are not simply mapping onto our knowledge of water in the world, but to our knowledge of water as it is mediated by a range of social, cultural and technological influences. The interplay of these influences can be usefully described through the idea of entanglement. An important facet of the relations between and human and non-human objects is their entanglement. In materialism to be entangled means more than entwined. Instead it refers to the process by which something emerges in an interplay of connections (Barad 2007: ix). Objects are always in the process of action or becoming as opposed to having a self-contained existence. To ground this idea: a software exists as code and on the basis of its design can be anticipated to carry out a set of tasks. But when carrying out a task in a specific situation, the meanings attributed to that software emerge from a particular set of interacting elements (the people involved, the task required, the wider context of a production). The meanings attributed to software are in this sense emergent and the concept of entanglement refers to ways in which our understandings of objects emerge through their relations. We may know how a specific software is designed to act, but what other kinds of actions take place within an assemblage and influence meaning? When referring to assemblages I have so far considered people and technologies. However, assemblages are also comprised of discourse. This latter point is vital to bring into play as it allows me to expand on entanglement and what I have so far called cultural and technological influences. Disclosures are discursive and through them we can see a range of agencies as well as circulating flows of meaning and power. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman comment in their introduction to Material Ecocriticism: ‘In all the fields of life, the materiality

Introduction

9

of beings and substances that support their existence is deeply related to the ways this materiality is conceptualized and discursively formulated’ (2014: 10). Consequently, thinking about the flow of power in production disclosures matters because how we come to understand something as opaque as software relies not only on its materiality (its code and consequent functionality) but also how we talk about it, or rather, how we are able to talk about it. Karen Barad argues materiality and discourse are not just add-ons to one another. Instead, they are recursively implicated through their relationality. How something emerges and meets our understanding is both material and discursive. As Barad states: In other words, materiality is discursive (ie., material phenomenon are inseparable from the apparatuses of bodily production; matter emerges out of, and includes as part of its being, the ongoing reconfiguring of boundaries), just as discursive practices are always already material (ie., they are ongoing material [re]configurings of the world). (2007: 151)

With these ideas in mind, when writing about assemblages in Invisible Digital I take them to be both material and discursive with their constitutive elements entangled. By taking an entangled approach to assemblages, we can see that the relations between human and non-human objects, which when caught up in an interplay of social, cultural and technological influences, are always materially and discursively mediated. In framing these mediations as entanglements, the materiality of objects does not simply support or ‘authorize’ disclosures about those objects, rather the relationship is recursive. How we understand the materiality of an object is contingent on disclosures and in turn they are contingent on an object’s materiality. Throughout Invisible Digital I describe entanglements as material-cultural narratives. The phrase signals that my approach draws from relational theory and materialism as well as production culture studies. John Caldwell, writing that industrial forms of theorization and critical debate are useful for film scholarship (animation and games scholarship too), suggests: Such things can provide strategic help in unpacking and unraveling the knot that now stands as the screen text. After all, filmmakers, CGI artists, trade writers and technologists themselves always speak simultaneously from their position as sense-making viewers as well as professionals. (2009: 170)

By bringing relational theory and materialism into this debate, unravelling the knot expands to include a discussion of software and how it too is active in the sense-making process of filmmakers and VFX practitioners.

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Starting with software Thinking about a production as an assemblage informs the analysis of Moana, No Man’s Sky and Everything that follows. It allows me to unpack how connections between different elements of each assemblage shape our understandings of the images we see on the screen. There are many ways into the material-cultural narratives of any assemblage but my particular focus is on the material-cultural narratives that emerge from software. Bringing software into the discussion of VFX is an approach I share with a number of VFX scholars in film studies and animation studies too. In his work on digital visual effects, Stephen Prince examined a range of software used in the production of digital images, drawing on production culture in his discussions. He makes use of these materials to explore the extent to which visual effects expand the expressive possibilities of cinema (2012, 2019). Lisa Purse discusses VFX and draws on production culture to illustrate how digital image interventions contribute to the production of meaning within cinematic texts (2013). Kristen Whissel in Spectacular Digital Effects considers software including MASSIVE and Morphplus (2014). In animation studies, scholars too look at the place of software in animation production. In my previous work I have directly studied the software Autodesk Maya and like other scholars drawn on a range of production culture materials (Wood 2014a, 2014b). Mihaela Mihailova writes about software in relation to computer-generated animation and labour practices in stop-motion (2013 and 2016), while Ingrid Forsler and Julia Volkova consider practitioners working with software tools (2018). Furthermore, there is a growing literature on labour practices in relation to VFX work, which increasingly enables the voice of VFX practitioners to be more audible in debates about VFX. Often VFX practitioners hold a contradictory position in production disclosures. On the one hand, many have a lack of presence, on the other they are a key site of creativity and innovation. Sarah Atkinson comments, when referring to VFX practitioners who worked on Gravity (2013) and Inception (2010), that this is: ‘symptomatic of the social, political and cultural status of the troubled global VFX labor economy . . . in which VFX work is effectively hidden, and in some cases the voices of the practitioners are silenced’ (2018: 159). Since the early 2010s, more attention has been paid to global practices in the VFX industry, their impact on precarious labour and the ability of workers to organize within the industry (Curtin and Vanderhoef 2015; Curtain and Sanson 2016).

Introduction

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Of interest to me are the material-cultural narratives around procedural processes used in the VFX industry. Disclosures associated with digital images created using procedural techniques often place a greater emphasis on the influences of automated systems and their algorithms. Although the term procedural can be used generally to define any computation, when referring to the games and VFX industries it often means a software that relies more on computer-generated objects. Describing modelling, Jeffrey McConnell outlines procedural modelling systems as: Instead of specifying all of the details of an object in a scene, the parameters for a procedure that will create the object are specified instead. In a procedural model, the data file only specifies the parameters for the object and the details are then generated by the program. (2006: 409)

To give an example, VFX artists in the production of Moana set the parameters of the splash and the software developed for the production generated the many millions of particles necessary to create the details and movements defined by those parameters. In the context of games design, procedural content generation (PCG) is often used to generate level content such as landscape or interior details of a location such as a castle or spacecraft. As Shaker, Togelius and Nelson state: The definition we will use is that PCG is the algorithmic creation of game content with limited or indirect user input. In other words, PCG refers to computer software that can create game content on its own, or together with one or many human players or designers. (2016: 1)

Procedural systems are used when a production requires a scale of data beyond the capacity of human producers. Sometimes this is a question of increasing workflow efficiency, the output of a small studio, or, as was the case for Moana, No Man’s Sky and Everything, the design of the imagery of the animated feature and the landscape of the games relied on using automation.2 When thinking about the options that software bring to a production and the kinds of images modellers are able to produce, it is easy to slip into considering software solely from the perspective of it as a toolset: simulation software generate impressive-looking sprays of water, and PCG creates massive landscapes or detailed levels. Such a perspective is only part of the story of a software, one touching primarily on the surface of an image. Software scholars including Matthew Fuller (2008) and Lev Manovich (2013) argue that software are not just lines of code that execute actions. Instead, software emerge entangled

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with a history of production developments and the social and cultural politics of their particular contexts. They are shaped by technical, organizational and cultural histories as much as the apparently immediate requirements of a specific animation or game production, the necessity to generate water or a landscape. As Mark C. Marino suggests, code shifts beyond its merely functional role (2020). Consequently, part of the work of Invisible Digital is not only to grasp software through the material-cultural narrative of an assemblage but to explore the different ways software contributes to those material-cultural narratives. By approaching software as an entity that picks up meanings from its contexts, its contributions to the material-cultural narratives of an assemblage can be opened up. Rather than looking at code, my starting point is with production culture disclosures, including technical papers discussing software. Beginning with disclosures, I give an account of the functionality of a software and its operations, how that software influences the stylistic choices and design of the images that we see on the screen, and also how we then make sense of those images. Adrian Mckenzie’s work Cutting Code, in which he focuses on the performative aspects of software, remains relevant to this approach (2006). Bringing in the ideas of entanglement and performativity to my discussion avoids a deterministic view of software. They allow me instead to tease out the ways in which the materiality of software (its coding and functionality) is entangled with the images produced on the screen and the ways in which it is performative in the disclosures we access. Our understanding of software and images is relational in that they emerge from the connections between them, and how these are then nuanced, deformed or performed within the assemblage of a production. Such connections criss-cross the relations of an assemblage drawing together the locale of a production with the narratives of studios and the wider cultural and social world. Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp argue that: ‘Institutions play an important role, down to the level of everyday language, in constructing reality and making possible a particular reality’s appearance of hanging together against a background of much greater flux’ (2016: 25). In a production assemblage, studios operate as equivalents to institutions; they play an important role in justifying decisions and authorizing perspectives on software, right down to the choice of phrases which often echo across a myriad of marketing materials. Even as marketing materials are written to pull potentially disparate elements together into coherent material-cultural narratives, ones that elaborate a perspective on both a particular production and a studio, they also reveal the

Introduction

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social and political operations of those material-cultural narratives. Moving between software, image, production systems and studios and the wider cultural and social world of production assemblages, the work of Invisible Digital is to propose a way of exploring both digital processes and also how we understand them through their materiality and culture.

The shape of Invisible Digital Invisible Digital offers three main case studies: the animated feature Moana and the games No Man’s Sky and Everything. Chapters 1 and 2 are connected through a focus on what it means to call water realistic. In Chapter 1, I address this question across a range of VFX in live-action films and also animations and argue that what we understand to be realistic about computer-simulated water seen on-screen owes much to our viewing experiences of VFX and animated water. In addition, I argue that the software behind water simulation, though based on physics and mathematical models such as the Navier-Stokes equations, is influenced by the production contexts of VFX and animation studio production. They balance physical realism against expectations of dramatic water, artistic control, efficient workflow, the cost of the production and the power of computational hardware. Realistic water, then, is not simply linked to the mimicry of something familiar from actuality, instead, it sits at an intersection of cultural and material influences. Chapter 2 focuses more particularly on the production assemblage of Moana. By working with a range of production materials and examples of water simulation from the animation, I present a material-cultural narrative relating to Moana’s simulation algorithm Splash. The interrogation of realisticness introduced in Chapter 1 is extended to draw in other ideas circulating in Moana’s assemblage. I argue that the assemblage of Moana illustrates how the specific material-cultural narrative of the animation’s production, and the projection of the Disney Studio’s self-image of collaborative working practices are founded on and reiterate the circulation of a wider promise of connectivity often associated with digital media. In Chapters 3 and 4, I explore two competing material-cultural narratives around the procedurally generated games No Man’s Sky created at Hello Games and Everything created by David OReilly. In Chapter 3, I argue that No Man’s Sky’s assemblage offers a digitally produced world calibrated at a familiar human scale. The game’s material-cultural narrative demonstrates how the difference of

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digital scales is deferred as it is reconfigured into familiar conventions of humanscale time and space. By scale I mean both the extensive game universe seen and experienced by players, the computational scale of procedural generation and the human-like scale through which No Man’s Sky’s avatar orients players. In Chapter 4, I argue that the assemblage of Everything reveals a contrasting view in which digital reconfigurations of time and space are explicit. Exploring the game’s procedural generation and the game engine Unity 3D, I show that the material-cultural narrative of Everything is embedded in a hybrid understanding of time and space, one combining the influences of human and digital scales. Software and algorithms are intangible, yet they make a difference to the contours of our lives. Because algorithms are a ‘black box’ to most of us does not mean we are unable to become alert to their place in the material-cultural narratives of digital mediations. There is a growing impetus to interrogate algorithms across a range of disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy of technology, software and cultural studies. Since moving images are increasingly digital, whether through digital cinematography, visual effects embedded in live-action films, computer-generated animations or games, they and their surrounding production cultures are a source of visual prompts through which many kinds of digital images can be investigated, described and understood. With Invisible Digital, I make the case that they are a means through which scholars in screen studies can enter into and participate in the growing debate about software both in relation to moving images and our experience of digital mediations more widely. Our participation in these debates is increasingly necessary as the use of AI systems in production contexts is increasing.

Notes 1 Examples of production studies include, for instance, works by Leo Rosten (1941), Hortense Powdermaker (1950) and Duncan Petrie (1991). 2 The increased use of automation within the VFX industry has serious implications for VFX practitioners. The use of AI in the industry is an area that is currently growing and will certainly lead to further debates about creativity and the roles of practitioners within the evolving workspace of studios.

1

What does water look like?

Moana’s release was accompanied by celebrations of the animation software used in the production and the ingenuity of VFX practitioners involved. Frequently focusing on the feature’s quite fabulous-looking water animation, these celebrations are a valuable starting point for examining whether or not simulations in cinema are, as is so often claimed, ‘realistic’. Given their vast scale and increasingly detailed textures, it is easy to get caught up in the visual appeal of simulations created with VFX software. My purpose in exploring Moana is to step around the power of this visual appeal and map a route through to the computational and cultural influences that inform and shape simulations. In a publicity piece on Moana Drew Turney, when writing for software developer Autodesk’s in-house magazine Redshift, opened his commentary with: ‘Imagine water lapping on a beach or crashing over the side of a boat. Now, think about re-creating that water, realistically, using computer graphics. It’s no small feat – as Disney’s Moana animation team can attest’ (2016). Continuing, Turney sets out to establish computer graphics as being up to the task of generating realistic water: Among the most difficult elements to animate are hair, water, and anything else comprising near-infinite individual particles or strands, each with its own mass and affecting the way every other piece behaves. The Walt Disney Company has long been a pioneer of realistic animated hair (a consequence of so many of characters being animals, monsters, or other shaggy beings) and even 3D-printed hair. With Moana, Disney is tackling the other final frontier in animation: water. (2016)

Aside from frontier metaphors, two further points emerge in Turney’s comments: hair and water are defined in terms of physics (particles with their own mass), and the Disney Studio as pioneers of realistic hair are going to take water animation to the next level. The studio’s technological inventiveness in

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water animation met with further acclamation in Cinema Blend, with Conner Schwerdtfeger highlighting the new effects system developed for Moana: Disney actually invented a new effects system in order to truly bring the ocean scenes in Moana to life. Known as Splash (obviously) the effects helps the tech animators make sure the water depicted in the film to looks just right with less effort. (2016)

Noting the water is ‘just right’, Schwerdtfeger goes on: ‘The hard work appears to have paid off, as the CGI water depicted in Moana looks good enough to drink’ (2016). Inventiveness and pioneering work are recurrent claims which continue to be made on behalf of practitioners in VFX discourse. For Disney and Pixar alike, innovative practice is part of each studio’s history and identity (Telotte 2008; Price 2009). An appreciation of what are often termed the realistic qualities of animated imagery also consistently recurs in reviews of VFX work and simulations in live-action cinema. For example, Revenant (2015), made around the same time as Moana, received an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Commenting on Revenant’s nomination, Nicolas Chevallier, a VFX supervisor on the production at studio Cinesite, said: ‘it’s a fantastic acknowledgment of Cinesite’s extensive work across the production. I think the majority of audiences, including Academy members are really interested in visual effects which strive for realism and serve the story rather than drive it’ (quoted in Frei 2016). This emphasis is also increasingly found in relation to CG animation when animation and VFX departments work together in the production of a feature. Coco (2018), for instance, was described by Ellen Wolff in Variety as exemplifying the trend towards sophisticated and highly realistic effects in animated features (2018).1 In many ways, this trend towards realistic VFX is the antithesis of animation’s potential to subvert our expectations of a world so familiar through lived experience and also live-action cinema. The inclusion of VFX in animation is far from the beginning of this trend, though. 3D-CG animation’s alignment with the three dimensions of physical reality, a widespread adoption of photorealistic rendering and detailed texturing have often drawn comparisons more towards live-action cinema than animated traditions.2 Depending on your perspective such a comparison can be greeted with dismay at the displacement of animation’s potential to bend, stretch or otherwise reconfigure the world, or amazement at the capacity of software and artists to depict such a visually familiar version of the world. Indeed, sometimes

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we might have both reactions at the same time. But whichever reaction we have, the comparison is often underpinned by an oversimplified equation between portrayals of the world and the mimicking capabilities of software. According to this over-simplified equation, software (and its users) effectively translate a mathematical model of the physics of reality into images that in turn accurately depict the world. In Moana’s case, that means crafting water that apparently looks good enough to drink. My emphasis in this chapter is to unpack and challenge the equation that simplifies the connection between mathematical models, computation and VFX used in the simulation of water. To do this I examine a range of marketing and publicity statements. As noted in the introduction, such statements are never neutral observations. For instance, the quotation earlier from Autodesk’s RedShift is inflected with the hyperbole of marketing materials written for Autodesk, a key software designer in the animation and VFX industry and the quotation from Cinema Blend an example of review hype surrounding the latest release from a major animation studio. As well as being articulations of the connection between CG animation and its increasingly ‘realistic’ qualities, these statements reiterate the implication that simulations model realistic versions of the world. By delving into such statements, my purpose is to make visible the gap between simulations and the complex world they are used to model. In Philosophy and Simulation Manuel DeLanda argues, ‘simulations can play the role of laboratory experiments in the study of emergence complementing the role of mathematics in deciphering the structure of possibility spaces’ (2015b: 8). There is undoubtedly a role for simulations in solving problems by envisioning the possibility spaces DeLanda describes. And, as Sherry Turkle has argued, it is very tempting to get caught up in the visual appeal of such simulations, leading us to take claims about their realisticness at face value (2009). As a counter to the attractions of simulations, I focus on water simulations created for live-action cinema and animation. Water animation has also been featured in many video games but their real-time generation complicates matters. Video games normally rely on real-time responses to player input, and these responses include appropriate changes to a landscape or environment. Consequently, the computational load of creating water in real-time needs to be balanced with also ensuring the responsive playability of the game. As the power of computers and the platforms running games have improved, especially in high-budget titles such as Uncharted 4 (2016), Assassin’s Creed Origins (2017) and Far Cry (2018), game visuals involving water have become more detailed and are increasingly

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able to show water reacting to the actions of an avatar. Writing about Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018), John Linneman notes: Water is another area that has improved significantly. Deploying stochastic screen-space reflections, there is a greater variation in reflection roughness and detail on the water surface, with reflections no longer appearing as a perfect mirror of the surroundings – and instead they are more closely matched to the properties of the water they’re being reflected in. This is coupled with some nice cube-maps layered beneath the SSR. The water surface also receives a nice shader technique designed to simulate ripples as Lara swims through it – both her body and her limbs generate a realistic wake – in motion, it looks superb. (2018)

Though I do not discuss water in video games further, Linneman’s remarks suggest that as water simulation becomes more impressive in games it too is increasingly described in terms of realism.3 Since there is often a slippage between the terms realistic, realism and indeed photorealism, providing an explanation for how I use each term is helpful at this point. Realistic is often used in a commonplace way to mean accurate or true to life. However, the recognition of accuracy in imagery we see on our screen or its status as true to life is very often contingent on contextual and textual circumstances. What is taken to be realistic is often embedded in conventions of cinema as much as it is in direct experience. The word realism can be treated with even greater caution. Describing the realism of an image may sometimes mean simply mapping it onto the same set of parameters already in play for its realistic qualities, or what I am calling realisticness. At other times, and especially in academic literature, realism refers to a surprisingly diverse range of aesthetic approaches including classical Hollywood cinema, documentary realism, Italian neorealism and British social realism.4 The term realism in stereoscopic 3D imagery is used broadly too, often in ways that conflate a range of other interlinked terms. As Miriam Ross puts it: Any discussion of realism is complicated by the fluid, permeable and changeable nature of the term. Although scholars have emphasised realism in the cinema both as an attempt to realistically portray the pro-filmic and as an artistic convention, public and press discussion concerning cinema, particularly 3D cinema, frequently conflates realism, realistic presentation, illusionism, naturalism, and other interlinked terms. (2015: 76)

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A similar conflation occurs in relation to VFX simulations of water, lava or smoke, with the words realistic, accuracy, physics-based, ‘looking right’, naturalism, brought to life, or vivid, frequently used interchangeably with realism. Before getting into the detail of water simulation I want to digress a little into the particular category of photorealism. Often itself a very loosely used term, photorealism can refer to VFX in live-action cinema whose form and style resemble the photographic look of live-action cinema. The photographic look is found in the rendered play of light and shadow effects on digitally crafted objects. A photorealistic look might follow a general or studio-specific style. Writing on the latter, Julie Turnock explored the evolution of photorealism in Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) from the 1970s and into the 1980s. She ably demonstrates how both studio politics and also the affordances of available technologies underpinned the studio’s use of the term (2015). As use of the term gathered momentum through its widespread adoption, associations more specifically with ILM have dropped away so that now photorealism is often used as a catch-all link between CG imagery and a look associated with liveaction cinema. It is worth noting here that with Invisible Digital my emphasis is on simulation software and therefore only explores questions of realisticness associated with movement and flow. This is distinct from the photorealistic qualities of water which arise from the textures, light and shadow generated using rendering software. As such the photorealistic qualities of water are not a part of my discussion of water simulation. Even so, Turnock’s work is helpful a reminder that such a seemingly straightforward term often requires cautious application. Even listing the diverse and overlapping terms associated with realistic qualities begins to challenge the simplified equation that uses software to underpin a description of simulated water as realistic or accurate. To open up the more specific question about the extent to which simulations are realistic, I start with the animated feature Moana. Released to great acclaim in 2016 by the Disney Studio, Moana relies on numerous VFX shots, mostly of water, though also some shots of smoke and lava. Earlier I outlined the ways in which the Disney Studio’s computational re-creation of water for the production of Moana has been celebrated for its realisticness. Two questions immediately arise from these claims: what does realistic water look like and how is it re-created using computer graphics and simulation software? The first question I answer by looking at prior cinematic and animated depictions of water and argue that these inform our understandings of what images of water look like. The emergent

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trajectory of water simulation takes in the VFX of live-action films (from Titanic (1996) to Poseidon (2006) and Life of Pi (2012)) and also animations, both fully CG (Finding Nemo (2003), Finding Dory (2016), The Lego Movie (2014 and 2019), Happy Feet (2006 and 2011)) and stop-motion (Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists! (2012) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)). These two sets of antecedents form a bisecting tradition, which together set expectations about what realistic water looks like. Such an expectation has the potential to shape the perspectives of VFX artists, viewers and commentators alike. The second question I answer by exploring the history of water simulation and VFX software. Through my investigation of water simulation, I unpack claims about accuracy in relation to physics-based simulations. Through a discussion of the evolution of simulation software I show that even in a mathematical and computational context, accuracy is subject to compromises and accommodations. The software used in VFX water simulations generates water which, no matter how sophisticated, remains based on a model of reality. Through gaining more understanding about modelling water, we also begin to see how presumptions about simulation software influence and remake our understanding of what realistic water looks like. Keeping track of how simulated objects have the potential to remake our understanding of objects in the world is essential to keeping open the gap between reality and our models of reality.

Water in moving images Of the simulated water in Moana, software engineer Alexey Stomakhin says: ‘Things are going to look fake if you don’t at least start with the correct physics and mathematics for many materials, such as water and snow’ (quoted in Wolpert 2017). At first Stomakhin’s claim itself seems correct. Taken straightforwardly, it appears entirely reasonable to think an audience will know when water is fake because it is something with which we are very familiar. Many people have seen seas, oceans, lakes, swimming pools and running water, so water is part of our daily lives. Numerous people have turned on a tap, dropped a container into water, splashed through a puddle, run through surf, dived in a pool, sprayed a hose or drunk a glass of water. Though the list of such everyday experiences of water could go on much longer, even these examples already touch on the varied configurations of fluid motion: turbulence, splashy-ness, meandering or rapid flow, shallowness, swells, numerous and overlapping waves. Such types of

What Does Water Look Like?

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water motion are seen by people out and about in the world and so we do indeed have a sense of what the movement of water looks like. It is impossible for me to say how far this knowledge of familiar everyday water informs an audience’s judgement of water when watching a film or animation or playing a game, but it is worth bearing in mind that VFX artists say ‘ordinary’ nature lacks the drama required for imagery in the cinema: The programmers needed to develop software that allowed animators to make fluids behave unrealistically while still fooling the audience into believing what they were seeing. ‘It’s a common misconception that visual effects are about simulating reality. They’re not. Reality is boring. Visual effects are about simulating something dramatic,’ says Jonathan Cohen, a 2007 Sci-Tech Oscar winner and principal software engineer at effects house Rhythm and Hues. (quoted in Fox 2008)

Notable here is the explicit point that audiences are ‘fooled’ into believing in the reality of what they are seeing. If reality is boring, then using words such as accurate, fake or dramatic about water becomes complicated. To unpick these complications, I look at water first in TV documentaries and VFX oceans and then in animations. Each presents variations of water to their audience and these, especially VFX water, inform the expectations of what water looks like to an audience familiar with moving images.

TV documentaries and VFX oceans Although an audience’s expectation of on-screen water (or sand, smoke, snow and fire) is partly based on everyday familiarity, impressions informing those expectations also come from the documentaries, animations, films and TV shows people have watched and perhaps also video games they have played.5 Sometimes the sea simply acts as a backdrop to the action and does not intervene in any dramatic sense. In contemporary cinema such as The Descendants (2011) or By the Sea (2015), water is part of the landscape, a scenic backdrop in which human drama occurs. By contrast, the sea is the drama in documentaries such as the Blue Planet (2001) and Blue Planet II (2017), whose focus is primarily on the beauty of the natural world. Both series of Blue Planet bring to their audience images of places on our planet that are impossible for most people to directly experience. The programmes show recordings of events that occur in these

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hard-to-access places, and great efforts are made to display these events at their most impressive and spectacular best (Honeybone and Brownlow 2017). Unlike most people’s everyday efforts to capture a sea creature sighting in a photograph, Blue Planet does not get by on glimpses of a whale’s tail dipping back into the sea. Instead, teams of divers, along with drone operators, track creatures to capture shots of whales in their vastness or in extraordinary close-up. As documentaries, these are recordings of natural phenomena, though shots are captured using specialist cameras and sound equipment. The footage is edited to enhance the experience for viewers and sometimes, very contentiously, liveaction is supplemented with computer-generated versions of animals and/or their location (Campbell 2016). All this varied activity meets the purpose of creating an entrancing story about nature using dramatic licence gained through editing, sound design, musical score and narration. Though water itself is not manipulated, when teeming with the activity of strange and wonderful creatures it becomes dramatic by association. Such programmes are not simply recordings of natural phenomena but are culturally inflected and orchestrated documents of life on our planet. In the case of the two Blue Planet series the inflection goes beyond the images themselves to the branding associated with the reputation of the BBC’s wildlife documentaries and the iconic status of narrator David Attenborough.6 Frederik Le Roy and Robrecht Vanderbeeken argue that analysis of wildlife programmes such as Blue Planet should draw attention to the construction of reality through different types of media and the ‘seemingly self-evident way in which documentary spectacles deal with reality’ (2018: 197). As they argue, far from being self-evident the sea is not just the sea in Blue Planet but part of a cultural and collective experience informing our expectations of what on-screen water can look like. TV documentaries like Blue Planet are only one dimension through which our expectations of what water looks like might evolve. There are many liveaction films where water is not recorded but has been created by VFX, and in a number, such as Titanic, Poseidon and the Pirates of the Caribbean series (2003–17), water is central to the story. As successful action films they add to the cultural and collective expectations of what on-screen water looks like at moments of heightened drama. As noted earlier, when I write about what water looks like I mean the qualities of movement and scale associated with fluid motion and not the lighting or detailed texturing of water associated with photorealism. These latter features are not created in a simulation but added further down the production pipeline. Though the two are inseparable in the

What Does Water Look Like?

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final images it is simulation software that generates the movement and flow crucial to the energy and dramatic potential of water. Key to the development of water simulation and VFX are the software RealFlow and Flowline as well as ILM in-house PhysBam. These were initially developed in the 1990s and advances in design of simulation software in the years since have been partly to balance the accuracy and art-direction of the shape and timing of flow patterns. Consequently, sophisticated effects with dramatic impact have become more available to filmmakers. As well as giving scope for enhanced artdirection, improvements and upgrades to simulation software (and computer hardware) allow artists to create increasingly intricate VFX detailing of splashes and waves leading to rich textures at higher resolutions. Starting from the calm digital oceanscapes of the 1990s with Waterworld (1995) and Titanic, between 1995 and 2010 water simulations have progressed to include textural features such as bubbles in the water horses of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). They have advanced to show complex interactions and realistic motion with turbulent water crashing around and into digital objects such as the beleaguered vessel in Poseidon and the Flying Dutchman sailing into the maelstrom in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) (Robertson 2001; Desowitz 2007). By the end of the 2000s, waves not only crashed with drama they were directable too, as seen in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008) and 2012 (2009) (Bielik 2008; Desowitz 2009). In the latter two films Scanline used their software Flowline in conjunction with a character rig allowing the water to be fully directed. For 2012 this allowed the filmmakers to produce imagery on the dramatic scale required for the disaster scenarios of the film. As Stephan Trojansky of Scanline noted to VFX commentator Bill Desowitz, they were: ‘making such a movie with such gigantic dimensions that you couldn’t follow nature’ (quoted in Desowitz 2009). By 2010, the growing mobility and directablity of VFX water and other large-scale simulations in major releases had established the criteria against which the apparent realisticness of subsequent productions would come to be judged. Within such a fast-moving horizon of possibility the credibility of VFX often only last as long as the latest round of cinematic releases. And this is the case for digital water too whether in liveaction films, animations or video games. As we are beginning to see, when a critic or viewer says imagery looks realistic their reference point is a heterogeneous mix of familiarity with the dimensions and movements of objects in actuality and their more heightened presence on cinema and TV screens. In part, this also touches on debates about perceptual

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realism and VFX. Introduced as an approach to VFX in 1996, Stephen Prince suggested that even though digital images are fictions and computer-generated, they are at the same time perceptually realistic: ‘A perceptually realistic image is one which structurally corresponds to the viewer’s audio-visual experience of three-dimensional space. Perceptually realistic images correspond to this experience because film-makers build them to do so’ (1996: 32). Prince remained influential in debates about VFX in the late 2010s when he commented: ‘one must remember that cinema is as much artifice as realism, a magic show as well as a record of reality, and that the two things are synergistic’ (2019: 72–3). Prince’s 1996 paper mapped perceptual cues from images to a viewer’s experience of actuality and draws on perceptual cues evident in both the lighting and movement of a set of images. Prince’s position has been further nuanced by scholars including Dan North (2008) and Lisa Purse (2013), who argued that perceptually realistic imagery needs to not only seen in relation to actuality but also through the context of cinematic conventions since these too shape an audience’s expectation of what is or is not realistic. In an equivalent way, physicsbased simulations produce wave properties and motion accurate to existing models of reality even as those waves are also configured and manipulated according to the dramatic needs of a story. The shared conception of what is realistic, drawn on by audience and critics alike, involves recognizing qualities that emerge from a heterogeneous mix of visual influences. The early 2010s saw more changes in the extent to which a simulation could be controlled by VFX practitioners and these remain pertinent to the VFX work in Moana. Signalling their ability to control simulations further with the release of Life of Pi in 2012 VFX artists began to talk about portraying the ocean as a character. The film’s drama is centred on the experiences of the character Pi Patel. He recounts the tale of how he survived being shipwrecked and set adrift on the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. Much of the action of Life of Pi portrays the changing dynamics of the relationship between Pi and the tiger as they encounter the ocean in many different guises whether becalmed, thrown around by storms or coming upon fantastical islands.7 Guillaume Rocheron, a VFX supervisor for Moving Picture Company, who worked on Life of Pi, commented on how important it was to provide director Ang Lee with a way of designing and choreographing shots because: ‘being able to completely art-direct the waves and the ocean would be a key component in making the storm sequences work. For Ang, the ocean really was a character and it was clear that we needed to treat it as such’ (quoted in Frei 2012). Bill

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Westenhofer of VFX studio Rhythm & Hues which also produced shots for Life of Pi similarly noted: ‘The challenge for us was how to portray an ocean that’s as much a character as possible’ (quoted in Failes 2012). In an interview with fxguide Rocheron elaborated on how the VFX team balanced realistic wave properties with enhanced wave characterization to support the story. He describes how their basic ocean template included waves that could be individually shaped and timed in ways similar to timing the movements of individual animated CG-characters. This practice was a step on from previous simulation work in which artistic control was primarily associated with controlling the parameters of simulated sequences where the basic template over which a water simulation was layered remained unchanged. As Rocheron explains for Life of Pi: We would start with a pre-established ocean template, with realistic properties in terms of wave size and timing but we were able to add, remove, shape or keyframe individual waves. We really ended up treating the ocean like a character, having layout artists and animators keyframing the base layer of waves that would then drive our final simulation. We were able to animate that base layer, review it with Ang [Lee] and Bill [Westenhofer] and lock the shot design and layout before we started the simulation work, which was a real game changer for us. (quoted in Frei 2012)

By timing and shaping waves as Rocheron describes VFX artists increased their capacity to manipulate water. With more detailed movements available artists became able to shape and time the underlying ocean template consequently increasing the intricacy with which a stormy or calm ocean sequence could be animated and simulated. For scenes in Life of Pi this was important because Ang Lee wanted to provide viewers with a more immersive experience. This required longer-length VFX shots of the digital ocean. Because viewers were looking at the shots for longer, the drama of the water needed to meet expectations of having details that were both compelling and credible. Achieving this end involved bringing together water simulation and animation techniques and treating the ocean like a character, a combination that remains important in the production of the ocean in Moana. Since the mid-1990s the simulated water of VFX oceans has moved from being visual background to part of the action. When imagery of the sea is exaggerated or heightened to show its power it is given expressive qualities which can be moulded to fit the dramatic needs of shot compositions and story. This kind of VFX is moving much closer to what is taken for granted in animation. Since

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most viewers have little direct experience of the extremes of water and its lifethreatening power, a history of film viewing and spectacular effects comes into play when judgements are made about whether something is apparently realistic enough. That judgement widens to include whether imagery is credible in the sense of being up to the visual standards of the era. In the twenty-five years since Titanic’s release its ocean effects have gone from groundbreaking to historic.

Animated oceans As an animation Moana draws on traditions beyond those of VFX in live-action films. In the context of animation there are many examples of water animation which predate computer animation. Within the cel-animation traditions of the Disney Studio itself there are famous antecedents going back to the Silly Symphonies: the cartoons King Neptune (1932), Peculiar Penguins (1934), Music Land (1935) and The Water Babies (1935). Feature length cel-animated features include Pinocchio (1940) and, more recently, The Little Mermaid (1989). Creating water using cel-animation has always been difficult because of water’s indeterminate boundaries of flow and chaotic motion and the need to keep the surface looking lively. To achieve this end animators made water look active and engaging by creating ripples, washes of spray and the motion of waves on a surface. Solutions for giving viewers the impression they were seeing action underwater were created too, with techniques initially used for Pinocchio in 1940 updated and extended nearly fifty years later for The Little Mermaid. These techniques included the background graduating into a dense blueish depth, light patterns (caustic lighting or dappling on the ocean floor) and bubbles added around characters.8 For the production of The Little Mermaid bubbles were hand painted into the final scene even though the shot showing King Triton waving goodbye to Ariel was the first ‘digitally painted scene’ created using CAPS (computer aided production system) (Sito 2013: 232). The combination of techniques just briefly outlined solved the problem of creating lively water and gave rise to what are often referred to as its ‘magical’ qualities – eddies, transforming swirls and swells and moving patterns of light. These cartoons and feature animations cover the period associated with what is known as Disney hyperrealism, where the fluidity of animated shapes and movement was bounded by the dimensions of actuality. As Paul Wells describes: ‘Characters, objects and environments within the hyperrealist animated film are

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subject to the conventional physical laws of the world’ (Wells 1998: 25). This holds too for fairy tale narratives whether featuring animals or caricatured humans and where connoting reality meant that the animation team ‘must necessarily aspire to verisimilitude’ (Wells 1998: 25). Cel-animation of water could never mimic the look of actual water so animators instead picked out elements of behaviour achievable using cel-animation and used those to create an often expressive and magical environment for characters to inhabit. The emergence of CG animation and simulation software in the 1990s created the potential for water animation to be taken in a different direction. Instead of looking towards the traditions of cel-animation the connections to photorealistic live-action become stronger. I am not suggesting that there was a decisive break since animation retains tendencies quite distinct to live-action: entities on the screen can be given exaggerated qualities or ones entirely absent in actuality. But even so the influence of the look of live-action became stronger. An early example of CG water animation can be seen in Antz (1998) made by DreamWorks and for which the company Pacific Data Images created a flood, condensation in a bottle and an ant’s ride inside a raindrop.9 Following on from Antz, Pixar’s production of Finding Nemo (2003) pushed forward the possibilities for CG water animation. Finding Nemo tells the story of a clownfish, Nemo, captured from open water, who is relocated into a dentist’s fish tank. Nemo’s father, Marlin, goes in search of Nemo aided by a blue reef fish called Dory. Much of the action in Finding Nemo takes place in a fish tank or the open water of Sydney harbour. Consequently, much of the production work was focused on creating the illusion that the digital fish were immersed in water with further effort going into surface effects such as splashes and breaking waves. It is interesting to look in more detail at the production materials for Finding Nemo as the production team emphasizes the possibilities for crafting ‘realistic’ water to standards available in the early 2000s. As supervising animator Dylan Brown commented: ‘I can see how people can look at our water and say it is photo-realistic, but it is actually caricatured as well’ (quoted in Cohen 2003). In the featurette Creating Believable Water the team behind the animation of the water in Finding Nemo describe how they generated a sense of immersion by adding particulate matter to give an impression of depth, added underwater surge and swell, caustic lighting and beams of light, distance murk (causing colour to change with distance), plus reflection and refraction. Though achieved in more detail, these qualities echo the markers of ‘underwateriness’ already discussed in relation to the cel-animations Pinocchio and The Little Mermaid.

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Writing about these details David Whitely compares their simulations to the documentary footage of Blue Planet: The multidimensional quality of constantly shifting light patterns in the marine environment more generally was so carefully modelled in a succession of early simulations, indeed, that the images became virtually indistinguishable from documentary footage within films such as The Blue Planet. The overall texture of the image has to be subtly adjusted so that it would not impede the creation of an animation-style aesthetic, which requires that some distance from reality be established to exploit the expressive freedom of the medium fully. (2012: 129–30)

The qualities of water to which Whitely refers is the combination of simulated movement and the lighting of water and its surroundings. Lighting and particulate effects were augmented by simulating splashes when the fish broke the surface of the water and for breaking waves on the also simulated surface of the water. As in the ongoing developments within live-action VFX, directing water became important when simulating the water for animated feature production too: ‘Once they were able to create realistic water, the art department began to request how the water in a scene should look. . . . They were beginning to direct it aesthetically’ (Cohen 2003). The production materials indicate that director Andrew Stanton sought to avoid a look that was too real and consequently, ‘the engineers tweaked the tools to fall back to so-called “hyper-reality” – the term at Pixar for a stylized realism that had a lifelike feel without actually being photorealistic’ (Price 2009). The animation team exaggerated numerous other features in the water too – heightening the richness of the colour of coral or making the lighting more pronounced than in an actual ocean. As is evident in these quotations the term photorealistic is often used in ways that collapse together various facets: the motion of simulated fluids, such as waves and splashes, surface textures, colour palettes and lighting design. In contrast with Finding Nemo, the production teams for the two Happy Feet feature animations drew on the influence of live-action VFX as their touchstone. Happy Feet’s central character is the emperor penguin Mumbles, who lives amongst a colony in the Antarctic where action is centred on many dance sequences. Mumbles, who unlike the other penguins cannot sing, has to dance to find a mate and these dances mostly take place on the icy shores of an Antarctic coastline. Where Finding Nemo opted for the stylized look of Pixar’s hyperrealism, the animators on Happy Feet (2006) emphasized qualities

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associated with cinematic photorealism. Made at the Animal Logic studio in Australia the production goal for Happy Feet was to ‘achieve an acceptable reality that took it beyond animation’ (Desowitz 2006). For commentators at the time Animal Logic succeeded. VFX commentator Bill Desowitz remarked that the Oscar-winning animation ‘transcends any boundaries between live-action and animation with its photoreal aesthetic and naturalistic performances’ (2006). Happy Feet 2 (2011) continued this trajectory by again aiming for a highly photorealistic look in conjunction with detailed water simulations of a water’s surface. As Rob Coleman, the animation director on Happy Feet 2, describes: We used [Exotic Matter’s] Naiad for all the splashes and for the interaction of the characters with the water. The effects team then stitched the Naiad splash elements into a high-resolution surface simulated in [Side Effects Software’s] Houdini. They were able to create a realism on the surface of the water that I think is breathtaking. (quoted in Robertson 2012a)

The aesthetic choices and reviews of Happy Feet and Happy Feet 2 take us back to where we began with claims for the realism of water in the VFX of the live-action movies Titanic, Poseidon and Life of Pi. Any accommodations and compromises inherent to simulation software remain in the background as the impact of the rather beautiful water simulations (and other Antarctic environments) of the successful Happy Feet films reset expectations about the look of water simulations in animation. Happy Feet and Happy Feet 2 sit chronologically between Finding Nemo and its sequel Finding Dory (2016). The latter was released in June 2016 just a few months prior to Moana in the United States and showcased a significant step forward for Pixar in terms of water simulation, lighting and especially rendering. In Finding Dory the blue reef fish Dory is this time the central character, with the action taking place both on the reef (referencing the visual repertoire of Finding Nemo) and a Marine Life Institute, a location in which the fish inhabit numerous vast tanks. Even as Finding Dory built on the aesthetic established for Finding Nemo the production team stated they aimed to bring a greater naturalism to the imagery: ‘One thing that’s changed, though, is we start from a place that’s much more grounded in reality. And then we have a choice of what we want to highlight or push back and de-emphasize’ (quoted in Desowitz 2016). In a similar way to Finding Nemo, creating an impression of immersion using existing conventions for marking wateriness – simulating particulate matter, caustic lighting and surge and swell – were again central to Finding

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Dory’s stylized naturalism. The key difference between the two films lies in the rendering system with Finding Dory the first production to use the Renderman RIS system. RIS was important to crafting the many immersive under water scenes and it was used in rendering the complex light paths for the many fish tank scenes at the Marine Life Institute. It was also important for rendering the simulations of water surfaces as well as the many splashes and waves which had become possible through the development of animation technologies by the mid-2010s. Stephen Prince remarked that: ‘Photorealism is often not the goal of digital aesthetics-careful cheats in the interests of style and tone are often more important than the simulation of camera or lighting reality’ (2012: 70). This is the case for Finding Nemo and Finding Dory with the style and tone of the water sitting between the influences of animation traditions and those of live-action. Though the production materials for Finding Dory emphasize the use of Pixar’s new rendering system, these two influences are apparent in the lighting and the fluid movements of the water simulation. Even as the Happy Feet films aspire towards creating apparently realistic water environments and the Finding Dory team talked about bringing greater naturalism to the imagery, there persists a competing perspective on CG water in animations. In the last five years several high-profile films have created CG water whose stylization matches with the wider aesthetic choices of the particular animation. For The Lego Movie (2014) Animal Logic again worked with a photorealistic look but this time mapping onto the plastic reality of Lego figures rather than naturalistic water. That same plastic reality and block-brick structure was extended to the water. In the scenes in which Emmett, Wyldstyle (Lucy) and their growing gang of Lego followers fall into the ocean, the production team used Houdini to generate turbulence and spray based on simulations of brick motion rather than water: Water, fire and smoke were all tackled using bricks. The directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller wanted to go down that road from the beginning, with a nod to those low-budget stop-motion videos bringing in a bit of charm. In Houdini, the FX crew would build particle clouds and brick summoners. Each particle in the cloud would have an ID, which represented a brick carrying a full description with color, size and opacity, and SSS detail if needed, built into the walls as well. (Hellard 2014)

A less visible move away from live-action water can be seen in Aardman’s Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists! (2012) in which VFX were used to augment

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traditional on-set stop-motion work. Using VFX to add water provided the director Peter Lord and his team greater control over the water. One difficult issue the team needed to overcome was matching the scale between a stop-motion set (for Aardman, scaled at 1:5) and simulated water. As a standard, software is designed to simulate water to the same scale of physical reality (1:1) and so the simulation needed to be modified to create an ocean whose movements, waves and splashes matched to the reduced scale of the stop-motion pirate ship model. Furthermore, the simulated water was art directed to ‘look fabulous in an Aardman way’, which meant adding squash and stretch, animating as well as simulating the water, and so giving it a more plastic feel. As CG Supervisor Andrew Morley noted: There isn’t a water solution available to do what we needed to do. We had about 10 different ways to do water because we had such a variety of water types. On a wide shot with a boat crashing through the water, we used particles, fluid simulations, and proprietary tools for our main mesh. On a close-up, when we needed splashes, we’d use RealFlow. For spray, particles. For a wider mesh, we’d animate geometry and use water shaders on top. (quoted in Robertson 2012b)

For Pirates! the aim when using particle animation software was again to resist any illusion that viewers were looking at a realistic simulation of the sea and to bring out instead Aardman-like qualities. A second stop-motion animation to use VFX to create water was the Laika studio’s Kubo and the Two Strings (2016). Rather than striving to replicate any specific studio look Laika opted to craft water that matched the Japanese woodblock style used across the animation. Adding wood grain textures to the water was one way used to achieve this aim (Montgomery 2016). As with The Lego Movie, and Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists! animators on Kubo and the Two Strings worked to match the textures of the water with the look of the story-world in which the action takes place. Steve Emerson, VFX supervisor at Laika describes how the process for matching relies on using a physical reference and then creating a photorealistic interpretation of the reference: For every element that would eventually make up that water system, each had to be designed ultimately to suit the style of the film and feel like they belonged in Kubo’s world. Also, for all of those elements, we needed physical reference. So the art department created water churn for us out of paper and showed us what that looked like. We’d take an element like that and again, create another photorealistic interpretation and fold that into our water system until we finally

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Across the different examples of CG water created for fully CG animations such as Finding Nemo, The Lego Movie and Happy Feet films and stop-motion animations such as Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists! and Kubo and the Two Strings, different versions of water provide a wider context for audiences to place Moana’s simulations, with all bar Happy Feet explicitly stylized in some way. The Lego Movie, Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists! and Kubo and the Two Strings show how simulation software can be used to create imagery that does not necessarily adhere to the look of VFX water in live-action cinema. I started this chapter by asking what does water look like. Our expectations depend on both context and also our experiences of viewing on-screen water. VFX work for both live-action cinema and animations now has the capacity to create art-directed water and so we can anticipate seeing lively as opposed to ordinary-looking water. When in the background of scenes, it can be shimmery bright or grey and hostile. Up close it has the potential to be more dramatic, shaped and managed to fit with the action or drama of scene. Water often has the appearance of moving in a way familiar from our everyday experience but as I have argued it is often heightened, managed, art directed into crashing waves, plumes of spray or giant swells. Moana builds on the traditions of VFX in both live-action and animated films. In keeping with the contemporary practices of other studios, Disney has the capacity to deploy both an animation and a VFX department for their animated feature productions. Where the animation unit animates the many models in a sequence whether Moana, the demigod Māui or Heihei the chicken, the VFX unit adds effects relating to water, smoke, lava or hair. Following on from the innovations of VFX production in the live-action features 2012 and Life of Pi, Moana relies on both water animation and simulation to create the animated feature’s characterful water. The imagery combines complex simulations of water allied to an expressive design of water, at times manipulated using a template rig to underpin the water’s motion. Alexey Stomakhin worked on the software design for Moana, and he draws connections between qualities often described as magical and/or realistic. He argues they are balanced between the reality of physical laws and the magical things that can happen in an animated world: Disney movies are about magic, so magical things happen which do not exist in the real world,’ said the software engineer. ‘It’s our job to add some extra forces

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and other tricks to help create those effects. If you have an understanding of how the real physical laws work, you can push parameters beyond physical limits and change equations slightly; we can predict the consequences of that. (quoted in Wolpert 2017)

Stomakhin’s comments draw our attention to mathematical equations and an adherence to the laws of physics at the heart of simulation software. To unpack this more fully I explore the history of water simulation and the development of VFX simulation software and consider in more detail the association between maths, physical laws and the ways the words realistic and magical are used. This will include insights into the physics underpinning simulations and touch on issues relating to mathematical and computational models, computational efficiency and the stability of a simulation. What water looks like is contingent on these matters as well as our accumulated expectations rooted in what we have already seen on our screens in live-action and animation VFX productions.

Thinking about software Having laid out the ways in which the visual cultures of documentary, live-action VFX and animation traditions can inform a viewer’s expectations of what water looks like I now turn to the software behind water simulation. This allows me to bring into play the material dimension of the narrative I develop for Moana. To talk about the material dimensions of digital water simulations I draw on work from software studies including that of Matthew Kirschenbaum, Johanna Drucker and Adrian Mackenzie amongst others. Matthew Kirschenbaum in Mechanisms (2007) argues there are two types of digital materiality, forensic and formal. An example of forensic materiality would be traces of data that remain on a hard drive even after files have been deleted. Formal materiality is a programmed software process such as simulation software. A programmed software process might be understood in terms of lines of code. But, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun suggests, it is important that we understand code not in a static or line-by-line sense, but in terms of what happens when it is executed (2011). For most of us thinking in terms of code, executed or not, is something unlikely to come easily. To anyone without programming expertise, and so to many of us, executable and executed code remains opaque. A productive way out of this problem, one I employ throughout Invisible Digital,

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is instead to think about the difference software makes to a situation such as a production context. Paul M. Leonardi suggests that the materiality of digital artefacts can be understood through the ways they make a difference to activities in the world: ‘when . . . researchers describe digital artefacts as having “material” properties, aspects, or features, we might safely say that what makes them “material” is that they provide capabilities that afford or constrain action’ (2018). Simulation software has been developed for generating water and its properties as software, its affordances, facilitate a production team’s ability to manipulate water in different ways. A further important dimension of software’s materiality is what Adrian Mackenzie has called its performative function (2006). Taking into account software’s performative dimension means accounting for both its affordances and constraints and how these influences impact on a complex production assemblage. I trace such influences in the output of a digital process, simulated water and in the cultural domains (reviews, commentaries, production disclosures) which are part of and also surround a production context. This combination of influences gives rise to the material-cultural narratives at the heart of Invisible Digital. A similar perspective is evident in Johanna Drucker’s concept of performative digital materiality. As Drucker explains: ‘Performative materiality suggests that what something  is  has to be understood in terms of what it  does, how it works within machinic, systemic, and cultural domains’ (emphases in original) (2013). To focus on what software does I look at the development of simulation software. Building from my observations about the kinds of simulated water we see on-screen I first consider computational simulation generally and then simulation in the VFX industry more specifically. These areas give insight into the design of software from which simulations are created and the complex interplay of influences shaping the ways in which simulation software has developed. In this section, my particular interest is in interrogating the relation between accuracy and physics-based modelling, offering a further challenge to what is meant by realisticness in relation to VFX simulations. At the end of Moana the island community of Motunui has set sail on the ocean once again. As the hero of the feature Moana has become a master navigator and shared her wayfarer knowledge with her community enabling them to take their fleet back to the waves. Her first encounter with her wayfarer heritage and the fleet of vessels occurred earlier in the animated feature following an intervention from Gramma Tala. Moana, angry at her father’s demand that she fulfils her destiny to become the leader of their people (he is the king and she

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is his heir), tries and fails to sail beyond the reef surrounding her island. Still a novice sailor and disheartened at her inability to take her boat beyond the reef, Moana declares she will stay on the island and do her father’s bidding. Finding her downcast Moana’s grandmother (Gramma Tala) taunts her so as to re-spark her spirit, taking her to a cave in which the old wayfarer fleet has lain hidden and undisturbed. Within the cave Moana bangs a drum on one of the vessels. The sound of the drum acts as a call to her ancestors who speak to Moana through the song ‘We Know the Way’, while also sharing a visual evocation of their past. In the ‘flashback’ the ancient fleet lead by a long ago king ploughs across the ocean with the crew, both children and adults, enjoying the journey against a backdrop of changing ocean scenes: azure blue in bright sunlight, greyish-deep blue in a rainstorm of heavy dark clouds, purple pink reflecting a setting sun and deep blue under a night sky. These vignettes of an ancestral journey reveal the ocean on a grand and colourful scale. The water motion and flow of this and the many ocean scenes of Moana were created using animation and simulation software, with lighting techniques and colour grading used to achieve a range of hues and opacities. Essential to the details of the scene were small splashes of water whether from waves slapping against a hull or paddle, the splash back of a hull hitting water, hands trailing in the water and dolphins jumping, or when the king sets foot on the edge of land at an island and a child gleefully throws water back over their own head. These many kinds of splashes were created using a then innovative development in particle animation called ‘the Affine Particlein-Cell method’ also known as Splash, which was designed to combine detailed flow with additional artistic control. Isolating a moment from another splash sequence further illustrates the level of detail created in the animation and simulations. When the Kakamora pirates attack Moana and Māui the boats of both parties are shown with turbulence around their hulls. In the case of the Kakamora boat, apparently designed as a tribute to Immortan Joe and his War Boys in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), the water preceding the bow is in turmoil, darkish grey and agitated, suggesting the havoc of their attack. By contrast Moana and Māui’s escaping vessel throws off the long white wave of a more sleek and agile craft. In both sequences the boats and their wakes are integrated with the motion of the wider ocean. This integration relies on complex and interconnected animation and simulation. As a boat moves across the ocean there are (at least) two simulations ongoing: the simulation of the larger ocean and the simulation of waves and splashes interacting with a hull. Seamlessly combining the two types of simulation

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was one of the major technical achievements of the animation. Though this achievement probably passed most of us by Alexey Stomakhin described the problem in an interview for the online magazine Phys.Org: ‘It’s easy to simulate a boat traveling through a static lake, but a boat on waves is much more challenging to simulate,’ Stomakhin said. ‘We simulated the fluid around the boat; the challenge was to blend that fluid with the rest of the ocean. It can’t look like the boat is splashing in a little swimming pool – the blend needs to be seamless.’ (quoted in Wolpert 2017)

Water simulations are used in different ways within Moana. They can generate wave action localized around a boat and also wave shapes for the rolling global motion of an ocean. Furthermore, the two wakes in the Kakamora sequence demonstrate how simulations can be controlled in ways that contribute to a characterization of water. The visual qualities of the splashes and swells express first the Kakamora’s aggressive and chaotic attack and second the focused skill of a learner wayfarer and demigod as they strive to escape. How water moves when it is created using simulation software is defined by mathematical equations that describe the physics of flow. These equations are programmed as code to be executed by a computer. The program is also designed to have sets of variable parameters that can be altered to achieve different types of flow. Though important, the physics of flow is not the only thing that matters when it comes to water simulation in an animated feature. In ACM Transactions on Graphics, Alexey Stomakhin and Andrew Selle write about the necessity for art-direction too: Natural phenomena are compelling, important, and pervasive throughout computer graphics. While physical simulation is guaranteed to produce a plausible and realistic simulation, artists are paradoxically forced to continually re-run simulations to target story and director needs – the process of artdirection. Developer and artist time spent on art-direction far exceeds the effort required for core simulation technology. (2017)

When physics-based simulation and art-direction meet they bring into focus the nexus of computational and cultural understandings of simulation. In the context of cinema, animation and games, the word simulation brings to mind computergenerated depictions of water or fire or explosions. When fluid simulations of smoke, water, snow or fire are embedded in live-action photography and portrayed by production culture as realistic, the viewing history that informs our expectations of realistic water is side-stepped. This impression is often

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shored up further through an emphasis on a connection between physics-based simulation systems and accuracy. A simulation is a computational solution to an abstract, meaning mathematical, model of a system that can include the fluid dynamics of smoke, snow, fire and water. In the following I put forward a material-cultural narrative exploring how fluid simulations in VFX emerge from mathematical and computational models. I describe how in the meeting between computational and cultural understandings, physics-based approaches are entangled, influenced as much by matters to do with computational efficiency, the stability of a simulation and costs to a project, as they are to do with accuracy.

Where it all started Since the 1990s simulations for cinema and animation have been created using software whose design draws from the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Jos Stam, one of the key figures behind the development of the complex algorithms based on CFD for VFX in the cinema, says: ‘Computer animation is not about reproducing reality but about the creation of an imaginary and controllable virtual reality inspired in part by conventional physical models of reality’ (2016: 98). Stam’s comment is an excellent starting point for unpacking the connections between simulations that appear on-screen and their basis in reality. We have already seen that many claims are made about the realisticness of simulated water in Moana but as Stam’s remarks gesture, what happens in the world is neither entirely nor only reproduced on-screen. Instead, what we see on-screen are computational solutions to mathematical models of physical reality sitting in conjunction with imaginative interpretations. To illuminate such entanglements further I delve a little way into the history of computer simulation, drawing out details about the associations between computation, mathematical models and the reality to which Stam refers. Writing for fxguide in 2011 VFX commentator Mike Seymour outlined the key developments of fluid simulations in the cinema up until that point. As is widely acknowledged, research at Los Alamos in the 1950s and 1960s laid the foundations for the continuing innovations today. Los Alamos, perhaps most associated with research into nuclear power and weaponry, was until the 1980s one of the few places in the United States with computers powerful enough to generate fluid simulations. The T3 lab, with Frank Harlow a central figure in the trajectory of the research, worked on finding computational solutions to

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classical fluid dynamics equations, the most important of which remain the Navier-Stokes (Figure 1.1). The Navier-Stokes equations were initially defined by the French engineer Claude-Louis Navier in 1821 and modified in the 1840s by British physicist and mathematician Sir George Gabriel Stokes. Sometimes described as the equivalent to Newton’s law of motion for fluids, these differential equations describe how the velocity of a fluid’s flow changes according to internal and external forces. Internal forces are pressures within a liquid and its viscosity while external forces include gravity and temperature. Within CFD solutions to these equations are used to describe the movement of air moving over an airplane’s wing, water flowing through a pipe, or smoke curling off a fire. Their capacity to model the complex movements of water, smoke and fire is what makes them so attractive for VFX work too. In his writing on fluid animation Jos Stam asks what a fluid is and provides the following answer: ‘A substance that can change in shape in a continuous manner’ (2016: 2). Stam makes this seemingly obvious point as a prelude to his discussion of one of the central problems of CFD: how to break down ongoing change into calculable pieces and then reconnect the computational solutions to ensure a depiction of continuous flow. A brief digression into the mathematics of the Navier-Stokes equation explains this further. The NavierStokes is a differential equation and for our purposes that means the equation refers to a quality that changes over time. This might seem straightforward enough. However, differential equations not only describe how a quantity changes over time but also how it varies throughout space. Solving a differential equation entails starting with some initial conditions (for instance, pressure, viscosity, momentum and mass) for the state of the system at the beginning of the simulation and coming up with solutions which describe velocity at any time and place. As it turns out solving more complex forms of the equation is hugely challenging because the details of flow are contingent on complex interrelations between variables of the equation, things like mass, pressure, temperature, viscosity and momentum. Even turning on a tap shows water movement to be

Figure 1.1 The Navier-Stokes equation which mathematically describes how the velocity of fluid changes in response to internal and external forces, which can include viscosity, pressure and gravity.

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full of different angles of momentum involving many interactions with surfaces and varying sections of flow. All of these aspects of flow need to be accounted for in an effective simulation. At the time of writing a complete solution to the Navier-Stokes equations remain an unsolved Millenium Prize Problem, a competition run by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the United States. Even though solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations are to some extent incomplete they have been taken far enough to have become a corner stone for fluid dynamics and CFD: The conservation equations for mass and momentum are more complex than they appear. They are non-linear, coupled, and difficult to solve. It is difficult to prove by the existing mathematical tools that a unique solution exists for particular boundary conditions. Experience shows that the Navier-Stokes equations describe the flow of a Newtonian fluid accurately. (Ferziger and Perić 1996: 12)

Boundary conditions here mean the shape of the flow and the points at which there are interactions between fluids and other objects. For Moana such boundaries would include waves breaking on a beach, the larger volumes of the ocean and also smaller sections of contact between waves and boats. Finding computational solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations began with research at Los Alamos in the 1950s. At this time the nascent field of CFD was coming to life and Frank Harlow in his early work on the flow of air around aircraft proposed a method for working with the Navier-Stokes equations using a computer. Reminiscing about his research in 2004, Harlow remarked: My main specialty at first was to look at what seemed very natural to me, namely supersonic flows, in which it is possible to imagine step-by-step the progress of sound waves across a computational mesh, and of the shocks that go through the fluid around various kinds of obstacles. I cut my teeth on supersonic flows with incompressible flows coming later. (2004: 415)

Harlow’s comment about imagining a step-by-step progress of supersonic flows gives insight into an important facet of computational solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations. Supersonic and water flows are similar in that they are continuous. For the purposes of finding solutions Harlow and his collaborators computationally stated equations for flow in a different way to the Navier-Stokes. The Navier-Stokes equations are more precisely known as partial differential equations, which for mathematicians means two things: they relate to continuous change and are not always fully solvable. As a way forward in finding solutions to

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continuous partial differential equations, Harlow and his co-workers conceived a way of computationally breaking the flow defined by a scenario into a series of steps. These steps were defined by restating the partial differential equations as difference or finite equations. Put in un-mathematic terms, flow is mathematically broken down into discrete steps, fully solvable equations whose solutions give the flow for each of the steps. To complete the calculation of continuous flow the solutions for the flow conceived of in discrete steps have to be recombined. In The Art of Fluid Simulation Jos Stam writes that there are two facets to CFD. First, a problem has to be a representation a computer can understand (a mathematical model of flow redescribed using code). Second, for flow to be generated it must be possible to update over time for each snapshot of fluid: ‘the representation has to be discrete whereas the mathematical models are continuous’ (2016: 82). Harlow’s solution, and its subsequent revisions in the years since, meet these criteria. Harlow’s solution, however, introduced another problem. The solutions to difference equations which define discrete steps of flow are an approximation and when they are combined to express continuous flow those approximations can add up to a significant error. To deal with this Harlow, along with fellow researcher Eddie Welch, proposed using two types of computational solutions to minimize errors in the approximation (Harlow and Welch 1965). These are known as Lagrangian and Eulerian solutions, or, in related terminology, particle (Lagrangian) and grid (Eulerian), or particle-in-cell (PIC) systems.10 The problem for Harlow, and one that still requires attention in contemporary software, is that these two types of solutions each introduce errors into a simulation which boil down to dissipation and instability or noise. In a dissipating system the generation of patterns that equate to wave motion peter out while an unstable one collapses. These kinds of errors reduce the detail in patterns of flow and cause artefacts, both of which have the potential to impact accuracy and the visual detail of a simulation. Though there are many other computational models for simulation, I have chosen to focus here on the PIC system initially established by Harlow as variants of this early approach continue to have traction in contemporary VFX simulation software. Yongning Zhu and Robert Bridson, for instance, in an influential article published in 2005, present an updated version of PIC, known as the FLIP system:11 As previous papers on simulating fluids have noted, grids and particles have complementary strengths and weaknesses. Here we combine the two

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approaches, using particles for our basic representation and for advection, but auxiliary grids to compute all the spatial interactions (e.g. boundary conditions, incompressibility, and in the case of sand, friction forces).

Since 2005 research into simulation algorithms has continued and meeting the challenge of creating water simulations for Moana has led to further innovations. Writing in Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 Chenfanfu Jiang et al. describe how, in the development of Zhu and Bridson’s PIC and FLIP system, the team sought to finesse a balance between particle and grid solutions in a new algorithm called APIC (Affine Particle-in-Cell aka Splash). Noting their starting position they argue a dilemma still remains around dissipation and noise (or unstable behaviour): The current state leaves us with the difficult choice for every simulation we run: (1) bias our simulation toward PIC, effectively avoiding instability at the expense of dissipation, or (2) bias our simulation toward FLIP, getting more lively simulations at the expense of noise and possible unstable behavior. (Jiang et al. 2015: 10)

I have touched lightly on mathematics and computation to show that physicsbased simulations are evidently built on mathematical models of a physical process (for flow, the Navier-Stokes equations) and that computational solutions to those equations are complex. They require degrees of approximation and compromise according to the needs of each simulation. Across these developments we can begin to see a gap opening up between actual flow, simulations of flow and the process of computation, one that complicates our tendency towards thinking that a simulation is somehow simply a model of reality. It is a model and a highly sophisticated one at that but it re-presents reality to us via the mediations of computation and mathematical abstractions. Such mediations include re-thinking flow as a series of discrete elements and the consequent artefacts introduced by the process of putting those elements back together to describe a continuously changing system. The gap widens further in the content of VFX simulations. Particle simulations used in VFX for cinema, and more latterly animation and games, diverge from their origins in CFD. Engineering problems explored with CFD have to meet demands that contrast with those of VFX. Engineering tasks require physical accuracy in a simulation when answering, for instance, questions related to safety design, performance parameters or medical visualizations. In such cases, the attractiveness and the visual appearance of the flow are of lesser importance.

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For VFX by contrast, the shape and visual behaviour of the fluid are of primary interest while physical accuracy is secondary. As simulations for VFX evolved their visual fit with the look of live-action cinema has become important as has their capacity to be art directed and controlled for dramatic potential. Writing in 2012 Mike Seymour noted: ‘At their core all fluid simulations are trying to solve the Navier Stokes equations, and balance realism, artistic control and simulation speed in a production environment.’ Even though contemporary simulation software has its origins in CFD, the first steps of particle animation in live-action cinema did not. In 1982 the world of cinema viewers was treated to one of the first on-screen particle simulations in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan. For Stephen Prince the Genesis sequence was the era’s great industry eye-opener: ‘. . . cinema’s first attempt to simulate properties of organic matter in a photographically convincing manner, one not intended to look like a computer graphic, as did applications in earlier films’ (2012: 22). Alvy Ray Smith (1982), when detailing the production process of the Genesis effect for American Cinematographer, described how the 67-second fully CG sequence was created from several different elements including a particle animation of fire spreading across a planet created from code written by Bill Reeves (Reeves 1983). The sequence begins with a projectile (the Genesis torpedo) speeding towards and hitting the surface of a planet. A fire then follows, initially at the point of explosion before spreading out. Immediately, other CG elements populate the imagery with fractal mountains, lakes, oceans of water and an atmosphere looking like that of Earth completes the evolution of the new planet from its fiery beginning. Groundbreaking in its time and influential in the 1980s and early 1990s, particle simulation techniques building on Reeves’ approach gradually fell out of favour because of limitations to their accuracy, especially when it came to simulating fluids flowing and interacting with other elements in an environment. In a gas simulation based on this approach, for instance, only the turbulent flows of a gas could be simulated with any interactions with objects in its path estimated rather than computationally modelled. By the later 1990s physics-based simulation software derived from the initial work by Frank Harlow in CFD had become the go-to option for creating particle effects in a VFX industry intent on combining apparent accuracy of simulated flow alongside the increasingly photorealistic look of live-action VFX. It is the era in which the simulation software RealFlow and Flowline first came into the marketplace. A breakthrough moment was the digital water created for the feature length CG animation Antz (1998). Antz was an effective showcase for the

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physics-based approach of Nick Foster and Dimitris Metaxas (2000) and, when writing a year later, Jos Stam noted how their approach enabled the flow past objects missing in earlier particle simulations: Foster and Metaxas clearly show the advantages of using the full threedimensional Navier-Stokes equations in creating fluid-like animations. Many effects which are hard to key frame manually such as swirling motion and flows past objects are obtained automatically. Their algorithm is based mainly on the work of Harlow and Welch in computational fluid dynamics, which dates back to 1965. (1999: 121)

Despite the emphasis on physics the end result of Foster and Metaxas’ simulation technique necessitates a series of accommodations and compromises. It is not simply to do with achieving greater physical accuracy at any cost through an automated process. As they themselves remark about their simulations: ‘These results are by no means scientifically accurate, but they do contain all the components of motion giving a human viewer the visual cues that we are observing real water behavior’ (2000: 65). This comment very nicely reveals the conjunction between material and cultural influences. The simulation technique proposed by Foster and Metaxas was derived from the computational solutions of CFD which gave visual cues for ‘real water behaviour’. At the same, as already described for water simulations in VFX and animation, what is visually accepted as real water behaviour relies on cultural conventions as much as computational ones. The importance of Foster and Metaxas’ simulations was threefold: they contained components generating visual cues of water, they could be created using the kinds of desktop computer then used in the emerging VFX industry and give VFX artists greater control over the simulation. Promoting their approach as valuable for VFX production Foster and Metaxas note: ‘Even though these last two goals – pragmatic efficiency and control – are at odds with the aims of computational simulation, they can, when applied to numerical techniques, be invaluable tools for special effects and animation’ (2000: 62). Going forward from 2000 simulation techniques have developed apace. The continuing emphasis on realistic flow and a capacity to simulate flow patterns depicting interactions with other elements in a scene creates the wider context for Moana. Other accommodations and compromises influence contemporary simulation techniques too. These include the commercial context in which off-the-shelf simulation and animation software would gain traction in the marketplace. Throughout the 2000s and in parallel with keyframe animation

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software, particle simulation software became widely available as enhancements to existing off-the-shelf software (Sito 2013). The most successful examples are RealFlow, first released in 1998, and eventually marketed as a plug-in for 3ds Max, Maya, Houdini and Cinema-4D, and Scanline’s Flowline developed in the 1990s and used as enhancements for 3ds Max and Maya. Though the manipulability of simulations (as well as presumptions about accuracy) is part of the impetus in these developments so too was making simulation costeffective for a production. With the introduction of software packages that would run on desktops alongside animation software, generating simulations required smaller scales of computational power. Even in the later 2010s and early 2020s simulations remain computationally expensive but the ability to run them on desktops or networks of desktops has made them a feasible option. An important facet in the development of software used to simulate VFX oceans was the increase in artistic control designed into the software. As a 2008 article by Stuart Fox in Popular Science noted: ‘Now designers are able to nudge, pull, and generally manipulate their virtual fluids to meet the directors’ and animators’ desires’ (2008). The Eightieth Academy for Scientific and Technical Awards in 2008 gesture towards the impact of these new developments. The teams involved in developing RealFlow, Flowline, dynamic fluid systems at Rhythm & Hues and the Maya Fluid Effects system each won awards.12 The citations reveal a range of reasons for receipt of the awards: RealFlow for its adoption and commercial availability, Rhythm & Hues tools for artist-controlled animation, accuracy and speed, Maya Fluid Effects for stability and integration into the existing Maya suite and Flowline for its flexibility (Academy Awards 2008). As these citations suggest, there is a web of contingencies surrounding the success of these simulation software – artistic control, economic use, integration with existing software – complicating any straightforward understanding of a progression towards greater realism. The move towards artistic control continued into the 2010s with software created to combine the agency of artists with that of algorithms. Automated particle generation remains a central element of simulation software and has been combined with increased user interactivity. In this sense, the agency of the software and that of artists fold together. Of this interaction, Mike Seymour has observed that realism was not always a central concern for software users and argues software design was more motivated by stability, speed and flexibility. He continues:

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Some readers may note that realism is not in that list, a point we put to [Nicola] Hoyle [then a pipeline artist working at Double Negative] who responded by saying, ‘The code starts with physics, but there is so much chaos in nature that we'll never get out of a computer simulation, without spending a lot more time writing code. And a lot of the time we have to tweak it to adjust weights, or other aspects and a lot of that is artist-driven.’ So Hoyle and her team do not expect everything out of the code, but they do expect to be able to reliably control and adjust a stable simulation to get what the director wants. (Seymour 2012)

Embedded as a quotation within Seymour’s comments, Nicola Hoyle’s remarks too gesture towards a meshwork of interactions between users (artists and programmers) and contexts (fictional environments). She notes that the influence of physics is part of a wider meshwork in that it sits alongside other sets of influences important for generating simulations including reliability, stability and artist control. Her comments give insight into the shared agency of an artist and the software: the software has limits and an artist is able to push at and manipulate those limits. An important element is also computer hardware. As desktop computers used in VFX studios have increased in computational power so too has the ability of VFX artists to create complex and detailed simulations and to exert artistic control over them. As Hoyle’s remarks bear out, simulations using particle animation software for VFX have come a very long way from where they started with CFD when powerful enough computers were only available at Los Alamos. Sherry Turkle suggests: ‘Simulation makes itself easy to love and difficult to doubt. It translates the concrete materials of science, engineering, and design into compelling virtual objects that engage the body as well as the mind’ (2009: 7). The compelling quality of simulations is particularly true for VFX simulations, especially when embedded within the dramatic or action sequences of live-action films or animations. Given simulations are often visually captivating and come with attached claims about realism there is a temptingly credulous view into which we could easily fall. There is here a danger of remaining uncritical about the claims for realisticness that so often accompany VFX, of getting too much into a habit of thinking the simulations on our screen are indeed the accurate depictions they are claimed to be.

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Conclusion As a counter the view that simulations are necessarily accurate depictions of entities in the world we can take instead the kind of interrogative approach I have followed in this chapter. One of the problems facing viewers with little deep knowledge of digital techniques and simulations is how hard it is to keep track of the difference between a simulation and reality, especially when a simulation is frequently described as realistic. Ed Finn, for instance, comments ‘when algorithms cross the threshold from prediction to determination, from modelling to building cultural structures, we find ourselves revising reality to accommodate their discrepancies’ (2017: 49–50). Finn is talking primarily about algorithms such as Netflix and the Google search engine and the extent to which they unobtrusively prime our choices. His point, however, is also relevant to visual simulations. Though simulations can indeed be difficult to doubt we do not have to find ourselves in the position of accommodating their discrepancies. To stop the gap closing between a simulation and actuality we can unpack the materialcultural narratives of simulations for what they reveal about their underpinning associations and connections. As well as expectations based on VFX in liveaction and animated water described in the previous section, these associations include compromises and artefacts introduced through the computational solutions to fluid simulation problems, efficient computational workflow and artist control, as well as the wider context of commercial availability and spread of software across the industry. Simulations exist at an intersection of multiple influences and so are far from straightforwardly realistic.

Notes 1 The Disney remakes of The Jungle Book (2016), The Lion King (2019), Dumbo (2019) and The Lady and the Tramp (2021) are interesting examples in which the VFX are designed to sit between the animated originals and the contemporary trend towards an apparently realistic look. 2 Christopher Holliday’s The Computer-Animated Film offers a timely corrective to this tendency (2018). 3 I do not discuss water in video games further because of the different computational pressures on generating water responsive to the inputs of a player. Computational power is a key factor limiting the possible detailing of water

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movements and surface effects in games. In VFX for live-action and animation features the computation power is overall less limiting and the water does not need to be generated in real-time. It is crafted to react to story-telling needs and baked into the final rendered images. For instance, Ian Aitken discusses documentary realism (2012), David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thomson consider the term in relation to the classical period of Hollywood Cinema (1988); David Forrest discusses social realism (2013) and Charles Leavitt Italian neorealism (2020). For instance, water animation features in Assassins Creed Origins, Sea of Thieves, Uncharted 4, Hellgate: London and Witcher 3. At the time of writing, David Attenborough had been broadcasting natural history programmes from the 1960s onwards. His first banner series was Life on Earth (1979), which has gone on to become a touch stone in wildlife filmmaking. Other key series include Wildlife on One (1977–2005), The Living Planet (1984), Planet Earth (2006) and Planet Earth II (2016). A feature of Life of Pi was the many long VFX shots of the digital ocean. Director Ang Lee required longer than conventional shots because he wanted viewers to have a more immersive experience. Because viewers were looking at the shots for longer their details had to be increased to maintain credibility. Chris Pallant provides an excellent overview of the production of The Little Mermaid, including the introduction of CAPS (computer aided production system) (2013: 96–7). Mark Cotta Vaz provides a detailed discussion of animation techniques used in Antz, including early examples of animated water simulations (1999). Lagrangian solutions describe the path line of flow as it moves through time and space, whereas Eulerian solution look at locations at a given space through which the fluid flows as time passes. Lagrangian solutions are based on kinematics, or the motions of points without taking mass or forces into consideration. Eulerian solutions are dynamic or take into account forces and torques and their effect on motion. FLIP is a hybrid grid and particle method, a variation on PIC. It is a solver implemented by the simulation software RealFlow. RealFlow is an example of a simulation software using the computational method of smoothed particle hydrodynamics.

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We are now in a position to have a more sceptical approach to claims about the realisticness of water simulations both generally and also in relation to Moana. Expectations of what water looks like can be culturally framed through viewing experience. Simulation software has a history of compromises and accommodations based on the presence of computational artefacts and the balance of pressures in a production context. With these in mind holding open the gap between simulations and the reality they model becomes more feasible. What is more, since such claims are so pervasive in relation to VFX generally, and the water simulation in Moana more specifically, it seems reasonable to wonder what other ideas about digital processes emerge when putting pressure on claims about realisticness. To explore ideas that emerge when putting pressure on claims about realisticness I consider the production culture and wider assemblage of Moana’s production. An assemblage is made up of a meshwork of associations. In the case of Moana some of these associations are computational and some are based on numerous interactions between personnel while others are cultural. Within this assemblage, cultural, technological and organizational ideas circulate via production culture disclosures, marketing materials and commentaries on the animation and its reception. In the following I am especially interested in how the idea of connectivity circulates in Moana’s production culture. Rob Kitchen has noted the difficulty of studying algorithms and comments ‘it is most productive to conceive of algorithms as being contingent, ontogenetic, performative in nature and embedded in wider socio-technical assemblages’ (2017: 16). The production of Moana forms one such socio-technical assemblage and questions of connectivity run through both the assemblage and the animation it produced. For instance, connectivity is an explicit element in the story-world of Moana. It is evident in the relations running between characters and deities as well as the land and sea. Connectivity is also frequently reiterated in Moana’s production culture disclosures as they refer

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to the seamless integration of the different elements necessary to the creation of the ocean as a whole entity. Consistent claims about connectivity not only outline the production of a complex and multifaceted ocean environment but resonate with an emphasis on connectivity more widely in digital culture. José van Dijck, for instance, sees a culture of seamless connectivity as part of the dynamic underlying our digital experience of the world (2013). Where van Dijck writes about technical, social, economic and cultural tensions in the digital processes and connectivity of social media, the production disclosures for Moana too place an emphasis on seamlessness. Within the production assemblage of Moana software, including simulation software, is entangled in a range of material and cultural transactions. Through its material operation, its execution as code, simulation software generates particles for a water simulation. Software also culturally influences ideas about connections and collaboration in the world-building processes of the feature animation. This world-building continues not only in relation to the animation itself but in disclosures relating to the Disney Studio and between Disney, Pixar and ILM. My analysis of the production assemblage of Moana illustrates how the specific material-cultural narrative of the animation’s production and the projection of the Disney Studio’s self-image of collaborative working practices are founded on and reiterate the circulation of a wider promise of connectivity often associated with digital media. This examination of Moana’s assemblage and its material-cultural narratives about realisticness and connectivity starts from the production processes. It looks in detail at the animation pipeline, focusing on the operational abilities of simulation software and Splash, a software developed by Disney for the production. Following Mackenzie (2006), software can be described in terms of its operational functionality (such as particle generation for a simulation) and its performativity. A less familiar concept than operational functionality Mackenize argues that a software’s performativity emerges through its varied influences on transactions located more widely within any assemblage of which it is a part. Through the idea of a performative software we can move from software as a tool to its ability to influence ideas and meanings circulating within an assemblage. In Moana’s production assemblage the materialcultural narratives around the algorithm Splash mediate and augment our understanding not only of simulated water but also ideas relating to digital connectivity.

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Moana and its pipeline On watching Moana we can see that the production team crafted numerous types of water. There are open, calm and stormy seas, lagoons, shorelines, wide ocean vistas spanning hundreds of kilometres into the horizon, as well as character-like water figures who intervene in the actions of the humans. With water fulfilling many functions in Moana how it looks depends on its visual proximity to the human or demigod characters of Moana and Māui and other figures such as the Kakamora. At a distance and when a backdrop to action the water’s role is primarily to look right for the scene: calm or stormy, with low or high waves and a glistening or choppy surface. Closer into the foreground water is open to more scrutiny from viewers. There water moves in reaction to contact from surface skimming craft and interactions with characters or it laps as waves and crests along shorelines. In such moments water is full of lively details which at times are expressive of oceanic moods. The ocean also goes beyond being an expressive version of something familiar when it performs in overtly character-like ways. This latter aspect of water is quickly introduced within Moana. The prologue features Gramma Tala telling the story of Māui’s theft of the demigod Te Fiti’s heart. Gramma’s storytelling is interrupted by the arrival of Moana’s father, the leader of the community. In the playful melee that follows Moana, at this point a little girl, becomes distracted by a glimpse of the ocean through foliage. Having made her way down to the shoreline she plays at the water’s edge before helping a hatchling turtle to cross the sand and reach the water by protecting it from hungry sea birds.1 In the beginning of this sequence ocean water laps gently over the sand and small waves ripple across the open water of the lagoon. As the toddler Moana stands watching the tiny turtle swim away from her the water begins to behave in a less naturalistic way. A vibrant line of droplets approaches the beach accompanied by a chime-like sound. This sound signals an introduction of the water’s character-like qualities as waves retreat first into a channel before forming into a puppet-like protrusion of water. Throwing out a trail of shells the retreating ocean catches Moana’s attention and draws her forward into the channel. The open space created by the water’s retreat frames the underwater world of the shoreline as though through the clear glass window walls of an aquarium. Across this sequence the animation and VFX team demonstrate a range of skills. The water movements are artistically controlled as the waves crash to the needs of the story, with splashes cascading to highlight

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the brightness of the ocean. In addition, the style of the underwater view of the ocean recalls the tradition handed down since Pinocchio because it includes caustic lighting, diffusion and a deep blue colour for objects in the distance. As the sequence continues the water takes on a more character-like form. First, a sock-puppet-like figure appears peeping over the edge of the wave crest so as not to scare the little child (and also not appear malevolent to an audience). Once it has fully emerged the water figure plays with the toddler by putting a flower on her head. When her father appears on the beach the water figure gently sweeps Moana up to place her back on the shoreline before dissipating into the ocean shoreline. Given that water is central to the narrative of Moana and the variety of visual types are extensive, the production team was faced with the challenge of designing a production pipeline which could combine high degrees of automation with a capacity for artist control (LaFrance 2017). Altogether around one thousand shots of water were needed: ‘We had to build a whole new pipeline’, [Hank] Driskill says. ‘We had probably 1,000 water shots. We wanted to raise the bar artistically. And we wanted to make the system faster and easier to use’ (quoted in Robertson 2016a). The design of the pipeline focused on establishing an efficient and connected workflow which allowed artists to visualize and edit specific parts of the water setup and also easily share their updates with other departments (Palmer et al. 2017). The pre-production and post-production stages of workflow are also interesting sites for analysis but my focus here is only on production processes. A pipeline refers to the main stages of production and these broadly co-exist in several stages: modelling, rigging, layout, animation, shading, lighting and rendering. The pipeline includes all the different software that might be used at various stages. On Moana’s production key software used for animation and simulations were Autodesk Maya and SideFX Houdini and these were operated in combination with Disney’s rendering programme Hyperion. Maya was used for character modelling and animation, SideFX Houdini for animation and simulation work. As a procedural software Houdini was particularly important for automating parts of the simulation. In addition, pre-existing assets (digital elements making up parts of a scene) of ocean variants were also included as compositional and visual placeholders to ensure continuity between the different departments working on the pipeline. These pre-existing ocean variants were dubbed Foundation Effects (FFX). They gave departments higher in the pipeline an accurate representation of effects created by other departments and around

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which camera movements could be set and characters could perform (SideFX 2017). As such FFX were not only placeholders for a completed visual effect but also a compositional tool bringing consistency to the crafting of each shot as it was moved through the pipeline (SideFX 2017). In addition to their deployment in water production, FFX was used for lava bursts, pyroclastic smoke plumes, cooking smoke and steam clouds. To create the different styles of water simulation Houdini was utilized in conjunction with both proprietary and in-house solvers. A solver is an algorithm designed to compute the solutions to a specific mathematical problem such as sections of flow in a simulation. Disney designed the in-house solver Splash for the Navier-Stokes equations which defined water velocities at any point in the simulation. At each stage of the pipeline different teams (layout, animation, VFX, lighting) access data defining the assets and digital components of a scene and also the datatypes of each asset needed to match across all the different elements of the workflow. The data was used along with other relevant information such as standard naming conventions, image size or polycounts. In a very practical sense connectivity in terms of clear communication and shared datatypes between teams is essential for an efficient production process. This was embedded in Moana’s pipeline design to facilitate a close working relationship between the different departments to ensure they had insight into each other’s decisions and outcomes. For the creation of the many ocean variants collaboration between the animation and VFX departments was particularly important. Amy Sneed, head of Animation, described how the two worked together: ‘It was a huge collaboration between our two departments,’ Sneed says. ‘When the water was a character, we had a very rough rig, and it was similar to almost like a sock puppet. And we would animate the water, and then we would work with the effects animators, and they would make it actually look like water, with the bubbles and the water effects part of it.’ (quoted in Wolpert 2017)

Sneed’s remarks not only emphasize the importance of the narrative of operational connectivity to the production’s publicity but also that Moana’s production combines cultural and computational influences. To facilitate artdirected movements ocean rigs (with variations including open sea, shoreline and distant sea) were built according to an ocean template and also designed to be similar in operation to conventional character rigs. The similarity to existing rig types ensured animators could adjust to using them quickly enabling them

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to easily modulate the types of movements necessary for the variations of sea (Garcia et al. 2016). With such a high degree of artist control available characterlike water could be treated as an acting challenge. For instance, two different water rigs were used in the opening sequence described earlier. One was used for the moment when the puppet-like figure places the flower on toddler Moana’s head and another when the water sweeps her up to place her on the beach. The acting challenge was to create wave movements expressing the gentle nonscary persona and playfulness of the ocean. For the same set of movements, the challenge to the VFX department was to make the performing water look watery by adding simulated water over the surface and bubbles in the interior of the puppet. The challenge of combining character-like water with watery water was met through the animation and VFX departments of the production bringing together cultural and computational influences. To explore computational influences more fully I focus particularly on Splash. Splash is a solver used in conjunction with Houdini in the production pipeline. It is an algorithm designed to computationally create splash behaviour in numerous shots such as waves breaking over rocks, along a shoreline or in reaction to a craft in contact with the surface of the ocean. As a simulation algorithm, Splash generates the particles which form the flow of water. With the addition of lighting and rendering these particle simulations form the water seen on-screen. Descriptions of Splash emphasize what it brings to the production as an automated process and these elements are often expressed in terms of workflow efficiency when Splash is operating as a plug-in or extension to Houdini (SideFX 2017). A VFX artist would define the area to be simulated and/or the parameters of waves (size, velocity and so forth) and then use Splash to simulate that area of water. As part of an automated process, it seems at first hard to get further inside an algorithm such as Splash and gain more understanding of how computational influences affect our understanding of the ocean. Like Ed Finn, Rob Kitchen sees algorithms as having the power to reshape the ways social and economic systems work but because they are ‘black-boxed’ it is hard to have clarity on how that power is manifest (2017). When aiming to say something about how algorithms influence our understanding of something a problem often encountered is the opacity of algorithms. They can be described as lines of code, instructions for a computer to execute. This is certainly the case for Splash but knowing the code tells us little about the computational influences it exerts and how these come to bear on our understanding of water. Malte Ziewitz suggests that: ‘one key

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to understanding the politics of algorithms might be not so much to look for essences with consequences but to attend to how the figure of the algorithm is employed and comes to matter in specific situations’ (2016: 10). Ziewitz’s position resonates well with my approach of thinking in terms of computational influences. Rather than trying to unpick the code of the solver we can consider instead the situations where it influences and so how it comes to matter. This is where describing the production of Moana as an assemblage becomes useful. An assemblage is made up of personnel, organizational and industrial systems, practices relating to the specific expertise of different departments involved in a production, numerous types of technologies including software, as well as the conceptual frames of the cultural, social, legal and economic worlds that infuse and delimit the situation of a production. An assemblage consists of a mixture of elements and also relational connections across these elements. By tracing out the material and discursive influences of these relational connections we can begin to explore how software influences situations. My access to production situations is through the disclosures found in publicity and marketing materials for Moana. With a tendency to emphasize innovations many of Moana’s production disclosures spotlight splashes and boat wakes in which particle animations simulate the qualities of flow or moments when the ocean becomes character-like. Consequently, it is clear that the Splash solver matters in relation to water movement in a variety of production and narrative situations. I have already noted how simulated water is often described as realistic even though the software introduces artefacts and that the criteria on which realistic is judged are a version of cinematic and animated conventions as opposed to water in actuality. The same kind of perspective is often seen in commentaries specifically referring to the automated solver Splash. For instance, Joseph Teran, a mathematician leading the team who designed Splash, is quoted as saying: ‘Everything in the movie looks almost real, so the movement of the water has to look real too, and it does’, Teran said. ‘Moana has the best water effects I’ve ever seen, by far’ (quoted in Wolpert 2017). As I described in relation to the production pipeline, animating water involved the use of ocean rigs which reveals the extensive art direction behind character-like water and the dramatic intensity of waves. Even so, in discussions of Splash there is more often than not an emphasis on its automated processes and accuracy and so cultural influences bearing on the use of the solver tend to be displaced. This has the effect of again maintaining a separation between cultural and computational influences and consequently the idea that simulated water looks real remains uncontested.

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Examining the computational influences of Splash is a route to further undo this separation. By applying ideas relating to simulation software to the specific case of Splash I not only make clear that physics-based simulations such as Splash remain framed by both computational artefacts and cultural influences, I also begin to draw out the importance of a narrative of connectivity to a simulation algorithm. To quickly recap. Splash’s antecedents lie in the work of Frank Harlow at the T3 lab in Los Alamos. A key feature of these initial developments was to find a computational solution for generating a continuous flow of particles and Harlow’s early work introduced a method based on a solution to the NavierStokes equations. These equations, which are fundamental to classical fluid dynamics, are a group of partial differential equations describing the velocity of a continuous flow. Harlow’s intervention was to re-state the partial differential equations as difference or finite equations in order to generate a computational solution. Through this computational process flow is mathematically broken down into discrete steps. The computational solution Harlow devised not only re-stated continuous flow as discrete steps but required a further stage, a calculation which recombined the discrete steps to an effective solution of continuous flow. Finding a precise computational means of recombination of these discrete steps continues to be a key difficultly for simulation software to this day. Because difference equations are an approximation of continuous flow, when recombining the flow velocities of many, often millions and sometimes billions of particles for a production such as Moana, even tiny approximation errors are magnified leading to unstable flow patterns or a dissipation (flattening) of flow patterns. Frank Harlow and Eddie Welch sought to lessen the impact of these errors by bringing together two types of computational solutions (particle and grid or Lagranian and Eulerian) in a method known as particle-in-cell (PIC), an early precursor to Splash. A more recent forerunner of Splash is the related FLIP method proposed by Yongning Zhu and Robert Bridson, though this too introduces dissipation and instability errors into a simulation (Zhu and Bridson 2005). Splash, also known more formally as APIC or the Affine Particlein-Cell method, was designed to minimize these errors. New software developed for the VFX industry is regularly introduced at the annual ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) event known as SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on computer GRAPHics and interactive techniques), and Moana’s production was no different. Amongst a number of presentations to SIGGRAPH 2015 were papers on Splash which were

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subsequently published in the Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2015. In a technical description of APIC/Splash Chenfanfu Jiang et al. describe how the team sought to finesse a balance between particle and grid solutions in their new algorithm. They argue a dilemma still remains around dissipation and noise (or unstable behaviour) and that their method reduces artefacts: In particular, we control noise by keeping the pure filter property of PIC but minimizing information loss by enriching each particle with a 33 matrix giving locally affine (rather than locally constant) description of the flow. This Affine Particle-In-Cell (APIC) method effectively reduces dissipation, preserves angular momentum and prevents instabilities. (Jiang et al. 2015: 1)

The innovation of Splash, then, is as much about reducing dissipation and preventing instabilities as it is about generating a particle simulation. As Jiang et al.’s paper argues the main problem with the method lies in the difference between data defined in a particle system and that of a grid system. Simply put, there is a mismatch of information carried by a single particle versus the multiple points of grid system information: ‘The key observation is that normally a single particle receives data from multiple grid points, but it is typically forced to reduce those influences to a single constant value, leading to loss of information’ (e.g. dissipation) (Zhu and Bridson 2005: 4). The key intervention behind Splash’s design and the team’s approach to minimizing artefacts is to reduce information loss through a more effective transfer of information between the grid and particle elements of the method: Our primary observation is that the dissipation in the original PIC results from a loss of information when transferring between grid and particle representations. We prevent this loss of information by augmenting each particle with a locally affine, rather than locally constant, description of the velocity. We show that this not only stably removes the dissipation of PIC, but that it also allows for exact conservation of angular momentum across the transfers between particles and grid. (Jiang et al. 2015: 1)

From these different pieces of information we can see that Splash matters in several ways. It not only generates particles for a simulation, Splash’s design also aims for a step up in the efficient connection of data. The solver matters too as one of the underpinning supports for claims about the realisticness of water simulations in Moana. But, VFX water simulation software such as Splash adds compromises since they necessarily balance cinematic realism, artistic control and workflow with computational efficiency.

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Added to this, simulations do not always work in the ways VFX artists anticipate. Erin Ramos, the VFX lead for Moana, notes that sometimes you cannot predict the outcome of a simulation, which suggests there are times when the necessary compromises or artefacts push a solver to a solution outside the acceptable parameters of a simulation: ‘As effects artists, working with fluids, you can’t always predict what you’re going to get from your water simulation,’ said Erin Ramos, the film’s effects lead. ‘And the hard thing with water is, if it doesn’t look right, you can really tell. Even if it’s in the background.’ (quoted in LaFrance 2017)

Similarly Jiang et al. comment on a surprising facet of simulation algorithms closely related to Splash (methods based on a blend of PIC and FLIP): their unstable errors can generate useable artefacts that might be desirable. They note: ‘We assert, however, that if such instabilities are desirable, the artist would prefer to create them in a way they desire rather than have them uncontrollably imposed by the method’ (Jiang et al. 2015: 10). As an automated process Splash is subject to computational artefacts and as a solver used in the animation industry it is part of a context where a balance between efficiency, cost and cinematic realism is necessary. We have learnt too that an important feature of a solver is effective connectivity based on minimizing potential computational artefacts. But what do these insights into Splash add to our knowledge about the mix of cultural and computational influences in simulated water? And more particularly what does being aware of connectivity and digital processes bring to our understanding of Moana and its production culture? Are not all digital processes based on connectivity whether software, social media, computer networks or Wi-Fi, so what more does the connectivity of Splash and Moana tell us? To answer this question I come back to the performativity of software. Giving an account of software performativity involves looking beyond software as functional toolsets and seeing them too as transactional digital entities influencing and intervening in the ways ideas and meaning circulate within the assemblage of a production. Rob Kitchen argues that aspects of our everyday lives are mediated, augmented and produced by algorithms and digital technologies as they do work in the world from within socio-technological assemblages (2017). The point I follow through here is that an algorithm such as Splash both materially and culturally mediates and augments our understanding of simulated water. Not only that, it mediates and augments ideas circulating in relation to digital connectivity

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in the production assemblage and these touch on concerns found more widely in digital culture.

Introducing performativity and software Adrian Mackenzie notes in his work on the Linux operating system that computer code ‘presents an unlikely candidate for performative analysis since it so emphatically abstracts from ambiguities of place, location, time and bodies’ (2006: 74–5). Within computer science abstraction is understood as a process of filtering out where characteristics of patterns not essential or relevant to the computational solution of a problem are set aside. Computer scientists Peter Denning and Craig Martell draw parallels between abstraction in computing and abstraction as a mode of thought: ‘Abstraction is one of the fundamental powers of the human brain. By bringing out the essence and suppressing detail, an abstraction offers a simple set of operations that apply to all cases’ (2015: 208). The process of defining something through its essential characteristics often involves rule building that necessarily includes and excludes characteristics based on whether they are general or specific rules. Exclusions are often taken to encompass matters relating to particular sets of circumstances as opposed to general parameters and might include cultural, industrial or social influences. Nevertheless, as Mackenzie stresses and scholars in software and critical code studies argue, performative dimensions of software are always linked to place, location, time and bodies, and participate in the circulation of power and agency through interventions in a situation (Fuller 2008; Chun 2013; Marino 2020). Like Ziewitz, Mackenzie is interested in how code and algorithms come to matter in situations and what that in turn reveals about the locatedness of software. A software’s performativity emerges through both its operations (what is does) and the ways in which it ‘authorises’ particular practices in specific situations. We have already seen some of the performativity of Splash. Operationally the solver generates particles for fluid simulations and, as I will now argue, due to its material status as a physics-based solver Splash performatively authorizes claims for realisticness. Software can be described as ‘a domain of technically styled expressions directed at doing things’ (Mackenzie 2006: 37). As a number of scholars have argued code performs or makes a difference to a situation. But how it makes a difference to a situation relies on both material and discursive entanglements.

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N. Katharine Hayles says: ‘code running in a digital computer causes changes in machine behaviour and, through ports and other interfaces, may initiate other changes, all implemented through transmission and execution of code’ (2010: 50), or as Michael Maloney suggested code ‘is constructed with action in mind’ (1988: 121). The actions of code, though, extend beyond computational changes in a machine. For Mackenzie code is performative precisely because its actions extend beyond immediate computational changes into discursive and cultural entanglements. The discursive and cultural entanglements that give performative dimensions to software arise through its capacity to mediate wider transactions in the assemblage of a production. In addition to the immediate actions (computational changes) elicited by the execution of software code, claims about those actions add to and fill out the range of associations authorized by the performative operations of software. For instance, physics-based algorithms, constructed on the basis of a mathematical abstraction or modelling of the world, authorize a set of claims about realisticness if allowed to let stand uncontested. This is because of the assumption that something based on the calculable physics of the world will be accurate. The solver Flash both creates elements of a water simulation and mediates our understanding of the water: it is materially and culturally performative. Simulated water is taken to be realistic because it is created by algorithms informed by physics. This presumption is relayed through the paratexts of marketing materials and industry disclosures and so reaches many commentators and informs a wider expectation of what realistic water looks like. Mackenzie argues in relation to his study of Linux: ‘[E]xplicit claims about Linux’s technical performance as they appear in advertisements, editorials, newsgroups, how-to-manuals and popular press accounts spin off the primary, collective performativity of practices circulated in a computer code’ (2006: 76). Such a spin-off occurs with VFX paratexts too. Whether to do with water simulation or other kinds of digital operations VFX paratexts reveal the performative dimensions of software. Accordingly, understanding software means paying attention not only to what it does in technical and operational terms but also to the ways both a software and also ideas about it circulate in the material-cultural narratives of production culture (Mackenzie 2005). In a production assemblage software sits at a convergence of ideas. It acts as an influencer which shapes material and cultural transactions. A software’s performativity emerges through an articulation of diverse ideas and influences and often involves a smoothing over of contested claims (Mackenzie 2006). And

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this is where questions of politics and power come into play. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that software and its codes are never neutral and consequently a software’s performance is not neutral either: ‘Software, free or not, is embedded and participates in structures of knowledge-power’ (2011: 21). Mackenzie’s and Chun’s attention to code as embedded in culture and participating in structures of knowledge and power place an emphasis on its relationality, on the associations and connections running between the people, systems and culture in the assemblage of which software is an active part. These ideas underpin my approach to software. While software can be described in terms of executed code leading to the operational performance of its basic functionality, a software’s performativity also emerges through its varied influences on transactions in differing situations. Those situations are articulated both within a production pipeline and production culture disclosures. A fluid simulation algorithm acts in the sense that it simulates fluid. In addition a focus on software performativity shifts to the complex ways a simulation gathers meaning through a meshwork based on the wider circumstances of production. These include the economics and politics of a studio, its co-existence with other facets of an animated feature and its alignments with wider cultural claims about computational technologies and their capacity to realistically model the world. In this way simulation software for VFX is not only a technological tool serving the needs of artists working on a production. Through its alignments with other debates simulation software becomes cultural too. Since software is pervasive in image making, and with paratexts and production disclosures often approached as authoritative sources of information, unpicking and contesting smooth alignments is increasingly important to the critical work of moving image scholars. The dimension added through a paratextual approach is also part of critical code studies, as Mark Marino notes: ‘I do not want to limit context to the material of code itself. Other paratexts also impact on the meaning of code’ (2020: 28). None of this is to say that the specifics of a software are unimportant. It is its operational and material parameters that come to bear on which relations are set into play within an assemblage. For instance, Splash simulates water and so relations pertaining to the flow of water are active within its assemblage. This brings me to the question of software entanglement. Performativity reveals the entanglements of software because it involves both material and discursive relations. For Karen Barad (2007) the concept of entanglement refers to the ways in which our understanding of objects emerges through a combination of material and discursive relations. Explaining entanglement

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sociologist of science and technology Michel Callon argues that scientific statements are: ‘entangled with the device that produced what it describes; the device and the series of actions undertaken are shaped by the statement, and vice versa’ (2006: 12). Putting this another way, the materiality of a software makes possible certain conditions such a flow of particles and the flow of particles leads to particular sets of statements. There is a recursive quality to our understanding as ideas and materiality flow together and statements both reveal and frame the conditions for how we conceptualize a flow of particles. For example, there are many ways one might consider a flow of particles but in the context of a water simulation software the flow of particles is framed through a focus on parameters associated with water simulation. Writing about the idea of entanglement Rebecca Sheldon explains: ‘ideas and things do not occupy separate ontological orders but instead are co-constituents in the production of the real’ (2015: 196). Ideas here are part of a discourse where a discourse is not just simply a statement or a specific idea, but a series of widely accepted and often unchallenged assumptions and presumptions that contour the perception of software and its material-cultural narrative. My discussion of water simulation and claims about realisticness details an entangled perspective in which one way of thinking is privileged over others. In this perspective software operationally creates particles that form a fluid, but how we come to understand that fluid is premised on a whole set of ideas about what is realistic (ideas based on our experience of seeing dramatic simulated water in documentaries, as live-action and animated feature VFX, and also through our familiarity with actual water). With code written according to a mathematical model of reality its materiality authorizes statements which narrowly frame imagery in a simulation as physics-based and apparently realistic. Taking such a narrow relationship at face value limits both our standpoint on the term realistic and software’s framing through a conjunction with the term realistic remains uncontested. In such a narrowly entangled perspective material and cultural influences co-create our understanding of what realistic water looks like. The demand for software designed to meet those criteria for realisticness adds a further layer to the entanglement. Ideas and things do not stand alone. The narrow entanglement between simulation software and realisticness is, however, contestable and in the following section I explore the Splash through its wider performativity by teasing out its various entanglements.

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Performing waves and performative Splash Splash authorizes claims about a number of different aspects of simulated water. These include water-like flow, expressive water and magical qualities alongside connectivity. To tease out these different aspects I look in detail at a key sequence close to the end of the feature animation. By this point in Moana the vitality of the sea and land are being decimated by a creeping lava that stifles life and growth. The lava emanates from the lava monster, Te Kā, who is confronted by Moana. In this confrontation Moana discovers that Te Kā is the negative to Te Fiti’s positive. On returning to Te Fiti her heart, which had been stolen by Māui eons before, the balance of the ocean and land is reset. The animation of water in the sequence leading to and just after Moana’s confrontation with Te Kā brings together a range of water performances.2 Featuring roiling waves with energized and agitated spray in response to Te Kā’s eruptions in the foreground the scene includes a glittery oceanic backdrop. The sequence takes place towards the end of Moana and so Moana has already learnt to wayfare from Māui. The beginning of the sequence sees Moana energetically navigating her craft to evade Te Kā. Moana’s sailing prowess produces curving splashes from the wake of her craft in amongst the curtains of spray thrown up by Te Kā’s enraged punches into the water. In the background of these visually energetic shots the ocean water surrounding the island though calmer is in constant motion with a gentle swell and rippling movement across the surface. Closer to the foreground the water is also responsive to Moana’s presence. Becoming character-like and involved in the battle the water intervenes to save Moana from the missiles of lava thrown by the erupting Te Kā and speeding her to dry land. Once Moana realizes that Te Kā is Te Fiti without her heart she asks the ocean to open a channel between the two figures. The moment quietens the intensity of the water-based action sequence into which Māui had also added his shape-shifting energy. Going down to the water’s edge Moana speaks the words ‘let her come to me’, and the water pulls back to reveal a dry channel that runs to Te Kā. Once the channel is fully open Moana walks in and towards Te Kā. Intercut with Te Kā’s angry rush towards her are shots of the walls of water rising above and alongside Moana. When the composition reframes to show Moana walking forward left to right across the screen, the walls are visible widening out behind her leaving pooling puddles in the sand. The crescendo of the sequence occurs once Te Kā has stilled and Moana replaces her heart –

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a small green pounamu stone. The follow-up scene shows yet another type of water performance. The ocean first lifts Moana and then throws Māui onto the island to meet with a newly restored Te Fiti. As the water gently lifts Moana onto the island it curves over and sets her down in a smooth arc of motion, its bright surface texture conveying a feeling of celebratory and affectionate uplift. By contrast the water’s handling of Māui is more boisterous and less respectful. He is tossed upwards in a grey-tinged bubble of water which then splashily explodes outwards dumping him unceremoniously onto the ground (Māui had, after all, stolen Te Fiti’s heart and so caused all the problems). Appreciating the range of water variations across the sequence, the expressive moods of the ocean water or its character-like moments, can move us towards familiar ways of thinking about performance. We could think in terms of humour and agency or the distinct emotional registers of the water’s stylization as it lifts both Moana and Māui. We are less likely though to consider any politics of representation with regard to water mood as the latter is more usefully brought into play in relation to the more fully realized characters of Moana, Māui or Gramma Tala.3 Even so, the performances of water are equally a route through which we can engage with the less familiar ideas about software performativity and how relations run from and between software, imagery in the animated feature, the production culture of Moana’s assemblage and its circulation of wider materialcultural narratives. The following comments in Phys.Org focus on mathematician Joseph Teran, who consulted for Disney on Moana and Frozen aligning realism with the physics-based animation techniques created for the features: Teran and his research team have helped infuse realism into several Disney movies, including Frozen, where they used science to animate snow scenes. Most recently, they applied their knowledge of math, physics and computer science to enliven the new 3-D computer-animated hit, Moana, a tale about an adventurous teenage girl who is drawn to the ocean and is inspired to leave the safety of her island on a daring journey to save her people. (Wolpert 2017)

Phys.Org is an internet news portal specializing in the latest news in a range of sciences including physics, chemistry, biosciences and technology. The emphasis in this article about the production of Moana is on the importance of mathematics, physics and computing to contemporary animation practices. By looking more closely at this article we can see how and where the performativity of Splash becomes evident and broaden out the complex performativity of Splash beyond the narrow focus that invests solely in claims about realism.

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As the quotation earlier shows Moana’s marketing and publicity materials often reinforce a relationship between mathematics, physics and realism in the animation, with entanglement emerging along a one-dimensional perspective. In the same article another member of the team, Alexey Stomakhin, reiterates Teran’s comments on realism as he describes how computation is necessary to meet what he calls the demands of realism when simulating ocean surfaces and water splashes: ‘The increased demand for realism and complexity in animated movies makes it preferable to get assistance from computers; this means we have to simulate the movement of the ocean surface and how the water splashes, for example, to make it look believable,’ Stomakhin explained. ‘There is a lot of mathematics, physics and computer science under the hood. That’s what we do.’ (quoted in Wolpert 2017)

Stomakhin’s comments take us from realism via mathematics, physics and computer science, to believability, all through the intervention of computers (and computer scientists). To say water on the screen looks believable relies on the same platform of understanding I outlined for realisticness. And, as we know, this claim can be contested. When we are cued to perceive fluidity as believably water-like, the visual prompt is as much to do with dramatic bodies of water familiar from documentaries, live-action and animated films as it is to do with water in actuality. When referring to the procedural animation of Moana commentaries in production culture often encourage us to miss the gap between physics-based simulation and reality. In the process several influences are narratively elided. The history of software development in defining the parameters of software and hence what counts as realistic, the continued pressure towards a growing alignment between simulated CG imagery and conventions of cinematic realism. With the place of computers and computer science unreflectively validated in relation to the entertainment sector there remains an implication that it is feasible to unproblematically mathematically and computationally model the world. The calm open sea or the spray of water is the outcome of a complex performativity but the multiple and potentially contradictory relationalities in play are overridden and quietened when simplified into a consensus around realism. Such a simplification can be contested by detailing other dimensions of software performativity. Further scrutiny of production disclosures reveal the ways in which art direction plays a part in shaping the animation of the

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sea. In these disclosures Splash is part of a performative transaction in which the software’s association shifts from being only to do with realisticness. Art direction is evident when animators use ocean rigs to modify water movement or manipulate the rigs controlling character-like water, in both cases crafting the nuanced and expressive movement of a watery figure or sequence of waves. Equally, art direction occurs through tweaking the operational functions of software algorithms with the design of Splash itself allowing such flexibility. Design decisions which include opting for flow based on action beats, the personality of water or defying gravity to ensure the integrity of a scene, are possible because of the flexible operations of the algorithm. Through an accounting of this wider range of operations the multifaceted range of Splash’s performativity and entanglements emerge. These associations run from software to images onto a Disney tradition for ‘magical’ storytelling and a culture of connectivity. The art direction of water simulation in Moana is most overt in scenes featuring water with personality. Splash was used to generate the waves crashing on the reef surrounding Motunui (Moana’s island home) and these required levels of intensity suited to the drama of each particular sequence. In the scenes when Moana first attempts to sail beyond the reef the waves act as a barrier knocking Moana off her craft. At this point, she is briefly trapped underwater with her foot caught on the reef. Though not a storm, the height of the rolling waves are nevertheless a powerful obstacle. Across the scene the waves are seen from beneath, overhead, as well as broadside and head on. The impression of power lies not just in their speed but the curvature of the rolling shape of a breaking wave, the swirling splash and foam on their surface and turbulence just below, all of which conjure drama and danger. These shots of the waves, along with white surface details and bubbles underwater, are intercut with action involving Moana as she is tossed by the waves or struggling to break her foot free from the reef. As a whole the movements of the ocean, flotsam from Moana’s upturned craft, and Moana’s actions, are matched in terms of dynamism and force with the animation of Moana’s flailing limbs and tumbling body integrated with the turbulent flow of the water. The seamless integration of animated figure and simulated water in these scenes show both the art direction of the simulation and also the importance of the continuity of its flow. Art-directed simulation was necessary to ensure waves would break at a certain moment timed to match the beat of other actions in the scene (Byun and Stomakhin 2017). As Alexey Stomakhin noted, ensuring such an interplay of movement necessitated being

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creative with the physics underpinning the simulation equations: ‘You don’t allow physics to completely guide it,’ he said. ‘You allow the wave to break only when it needs to break’ (quoted in Wolpert 2017). Tracking back to the performativity of Splash this example shows that the solver’s operational parameters are flexible enough to push beyond criteria defined as modelled reality. With this observation we step away from a singular performative dimension for Splash and can start to see it as more multifaceted. Operationally this multifaceted quality extends to creating water with more obvious personality such as the expressively moody water that lifted Moana and Māui onto dry land to meet Te Fiti following her reawakening. When creating water with more character-like qualities the behaviour of water is pushed beyond even these moody water moments. Examples include the ocean highfiving Moana, towering above Moana and Gramma Tala as the two commune with it, or when the ocean intervenes at key moments of action. In the sequence preceding Moana’s face-to-face encounter with Te Kā/Te Fiti, the water extrudes into a shape which first saves her from a lava ball and then propels her to dry land. Writing about the physics behind the behaviour of water that performs in these ways Ben Frost, Stomakhin and Narit, note how it defies physics and yet relies on it too: The challenge with performing water was to provide art-directed simulations, defying physics, yet remaining in a grounded sense of possibility. Incorporating natural swells and flows to support the building of designed shapes limited anthropomorphic features, and played to our goal of communicating that this character is the ocean as a whole. (2017)

The quotation reveals several aspects of Splash’s multifaceted operations and some sense of its performativity too. Performing water whether as expressively moody water or character-like figures relies on the same computational system which produces the more naturalistic swells and flows. The same physics underpins a simulation based on realistic behaviours as in one involving performative water. In the former latter physics of the equations are pushed beyond the norms of the physical limits of actuality. Though the water in Moana is often referred to in terms of its realistisness there are other frames of reference for performing water: the conventions of animation which have emerged in studio-produced computer-animated films, especially in 3D-CG work. Stylized realism and hyperrealism are terms which refer to the ways makers of computer animation resisted mimicking actuality

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when they instead opted for a look only approaching reality. Due to its success in producing globally popular films Pixar has been particularly influential in establishing the look of computer animation. Chris Pallant describes how Pixar added an expressive quality to models in Toy Story (1995) with the purpose of decreasing the impression they were simply geometrically accurate versions of objects or figures (2011: 133). Similarly, J. P. Telotte argues Pixar has tended to pull back from the potential for animation technology to reproduce reality by creating work he calls ‘stylized animation’ (2010: 203–9). This reduction of apparent realism is also evident in early examples of computer-animated water. David Price recalls Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton explaining that talking fish would look out of place in a photorealistic version of an ocean. The animators instead stylized the underwater scenes, exaggerating the colour of coral and brightening the underwater lighting (2009). Stylized realism in diverse computer-animated shorts (Piper (2016), Lou (2017) and Bao (2018)) and features (Incredibles 2 (2018), Toy Story IV (2019) and Onward (2020)) continues to be visible as the dimensions of objects are pushed beyond physical norms. Squash and stretch are added to the animation of models, simulations of fur and hair are art-directed and tweaked to meet the dramatic needs of a scene or to match the personality quirks of a character. As Christopher Holliday puts it: Their [computer-animated films] narratives operate at the border, by retaining animatedness and playing with their degrees of difference from live-action film. Computer animated films do not want spectators to mistake them for liveaction worlds, however. Making use of a stylised, caricatured aesthetic, despite the heightened level of mimesis afforded by technological advancement, is just one of the processes by which these films creatively, imaginatively and playfully remind spectators of their animatedness. (2018: 71)

Holliday draws attention to the mix of a stylized and caricatured aesthetic along with the potential for a heightened level of mimesis. Pixar’s Piper, released prior to the studio’s watery Finding Dory, combines this mixture of stylization and heightened level of mimesis and shows how they seem to be sitting more easily together. The central character Piper is a seabird chick who lives with her family on the edge of the beach. She is at first afraid of foraging for food and we see her struggles amongst beautifully rendered sandscapes and imagery of tidal water. The sand was created using procedural animation with Houdini and lit using Pixar’s at the time new RIS rendering system (Pedersen 2017). Amongst this beachside imagery the chick remains visibly stylized with

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the young Piper’s fluffy feathers accentuated and her body animated to express the lows of both her initial defeats and highs of her subsequent successes. Though Piper is clearly stylized it is easy to overlook that the seemingly realistic sand animation is directed to fit the action too. A combination of stylized animated figures and carefully rendered water is visible too in Finding Dory. Unlike the era of 2003’s Finding Nemo by 2017 audiences did not seem to find evidently animated talking fish and sea lions to be out of place in the more photorealistic ocean created for Finding Dory. It is also the case in Disney’s Moana that figures who inhabit the various scenes of the animation are stylized and caricatured according to the conventions of computer animation. As Kirsten Moana Thompson notes, the addition of 2D animation onto the surface of Māui’s body via his tattoos adds to the stylization of the characters (2018). The various characters inhabit the carefully and equally crafted water of Moana and these too draw on a range of conventions that exceed references to realisticness. One further set of conventions associated more particularly with the Disney Studio are those often described as magical. Across the output of the Disney Studio which is comprised of animated features and shorts, TV franchises such as The Wonderful World of Disney (1969–79 and 1991–present) and The Magical World of Disney (1988–90), and also the Magic Kingdom theme park and Disney Land in both Florida and Paris, there is a particular connection to the notion of Disney’s magical qualities. Alexey Stomakhin describes Disney animation as being about magic with magical things happening (quoted in Wolpert 2017). Other members of the VFX team also describe the water as magical: For the film’s technical supervisor Hank Driskill and visual effects supervisor Kyle Odermatt, one of the biggest challenges was creating water that could perform on screen. ‘We wanted the water to behave in a way that’s the same as what you see in real life, so it doesn’t draw your eye and seem unreal,’ says Odermatt. ‘It’s magical, but it has to feel plausible.’ (quoted in White 2017)

In evoking the idea of magical and plausible water such comments reveal that potentially opposing facets of a software’s performativity (realistic versus magical) are negotiated in the studio’s marketing strategy. There is a potential here to destabilize the material-cultural narrative about realism – can something be both magical and realistic? But since magical is a term long associated with Disney the conjunction of realism and magic serves to bring the studio’s history of animation and technological engagement more explicitly into the material-

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cultural narrative. When water is both magical and plausible, automated procedural animation is aligned with Disney’s self-identity as a magical kingdom built on technology. As Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Parks, states on the Disney website: At Disney, we’ve always pushed the boundaries of technology and innovation to entertain our guests and create experiences that are unlike anything else in the world . . . Walt Disney himself was absolutely fascinated by the technology of his day, and by the possibilities it represented for the movie and theme park industries. He invented the multi-plane camera and used Technicolor in his animated films . . . then moved on to create  Audio-Animatronics  figures for Disneyland shows like ‘Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln’ and ‘Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room.’ That was just the beginning, and Walt’s curiosity, imagination and ingenuity set the stage for the decades of invention and discovery that have followed. (2021)

As these several examples show, when looking beyond assertions about the realism of animated water the diverse and potentially contradictory performativity of a software such as Splash becomes more evident. Its material-cultural narrative encompasses not only realism but magical qualities that in turn connect to and reinforce the Disney Studio’s historical sense of itself as having an identity associated with technological innovation. The word magical may be used to describe entrancing qualities of the imagery but it is also a promotion strategy about innovative technologies. Claims about realistic or magical water, then, are not straightforward descriptions. Far from neutral they are already scripted and mediated narratives. As part of a series of production disclosures such claims are a meeting point of social, cultural and organizational influences whose narratives circulate through the production culture of an assemblage. Running through these narratives are all kinds of associations which combine and can serve to reiterate studio, software developer and professional identities, as well as insights about water. This is not a novel insight in itself as John Caldwell, Julie Turnock and Sarah Atkinson, amongst others, show this to be the case in their production-based studies (Caldwell 2008; Turnock 2015; Atkinson 2018). The additional point I emphasize through Moana is that associations are not only discursive as they are entangled with materiality that emerges from the operational functionality of software. Splash is part of transaction that intersects with and influences material and cultural narratives. The performativity of software is not limited

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to its operational functionality as it provokes and authorizes paratextual claims about it too (Mackenzie 2005). One trajectory of entanglement occurs when Splash operates by executing coded instructions to simulate splashes of water. As these outputs of a software’s action are incorporated into the storytelling of an animated feature they become discursively entangled and gather up meaning through their relations with other visual elements within the feature and also production culture commentaries about them. Coming together in a meshwork of social, cultural and technological influences making up an assemblage, software has power in the sense that its performativity authorizes some claims over others. When these claims coincide with the interests of a studio or software developer the two reinforce and legitimize each other. J. P. Telotte describes Disney as one of the largest and most powerful entertainment companies in the world with an audience that seems ‘increasingly aware that it inhabits a thoroughly technological, mediated environment – one to which Disney lends a most inviting and even seductive countenance’ (2010: 3). The balance of realisticness and magic in Moana is, I suggest, one such countenance. It invites by asking its audience to believe that image-making technology is sufficiently powerful to mimic the world and then seduces by making that world more dramatic than reality. Tracing out the entanglements of software, exposing how it becomes caught up with and authorizes the claims of different sets of disclosures, allows us to resist this invitation and contest the seamless perspective it offers on mediated reality. Connectivity is also an important dimension in the material-cultural narrative of Moana’s assemblage. Pragmatically connectivity is essential in maintaining visual appeal since it is central to the seamlessness of the ocean images. Returning again to the channel sequence discussed earlier. On watching the imagery we are likely paying most attention to Moana’s slow walk along the seabed towards the enraged and advancing Te Fiti and not taking in the detail of the walls of water. Just as we have already seen in the examples of characterlike protrusions of water and moody waves lifting Moana and Māui out of the ocean, the water walls combine physics-based and art-directed simulations. Commenting on the workflow behind the construction of the water wall, VFX artist Hiroaki Narita recounts how the team balanced physics-based flow behaviour with art direction: ‘We were provided various proxy geometries for target shapes of the water wall by the layout department,’ explains effects artist Hiroaki Narita. ‘Then we

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The type of workflow Narita is talking about here relies on the connectivity of data embedded in the pipeline design as well as interactions between the different departments involved in the production. The combination of integrated fluid flow and art direction necessary to make the ocean’s intention readable is visible as the water pulls back and curls over when opening out into a trench along the ocean floor. Although a fantastical sequence, the combination of physics and art direction nevertheless maintains plausibility by ensuring the waves and their motion are in keeping with the water throughout Moana. The look of the water obeys the range of rules set up within the story-world of the animation. As the walls of water take form the surface simulation maintains a bubbling upward flow, with white water slashes at the apex of motion matching the global movement of the waves. At the same time, a downward flow accumulates into small pooling puddles that edge the sand of the channel. Utilizing two layers of simulation it appears as though the water is flowing with a familiar motion, albeit in two directions at once. A similar strategy is used when simulating water for the character-like water protrusions. As an example of a physics-based animation manipulated to finesse the look and behaviour of water Ben Frost describes how character-like water was first animated using a rough rig. Water simulation effects were then added with the water flowing upwards into the apex of the figure, a trajectory which runs counter to reality: ‘Using the velocity of the ocean wave trains defined by the layout department, and mixing in forces that would suck water up into the shape of the character, we could achieve a naturalistic swell driven flow’ (quoted in SideFX 2017). As Frost describes, the solver’s parameters were set to simulate water that defied physics (ran upwards) while relying on it as well. When aiming to make sense of the dual flow on the water walls of the channel and the character-like figures, it seems reasonable at first to think of them in terms of a kind of stylized realism, as water-like flow with magical qualities. Yet, the dual flow of water is not entirely met by this description. The flow is somewhere in-between water-like and magical and exceeds both the terms realistic and stylized. With software performativity in mind, the out of the ordinary flow prompts a reminder we are looking at movement crafted by

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solvers such as Splash generating volumes of simulated particles. As viewers of the final version of the animation we can only be indirectly aware of the particles since they are rendered using Disney’s in-house Hyperion. In a simulation, particles fill a pre-defined area but remain as individual points of velocity. When treated as a coherent volume such as a wave they have the appearance of being connected in the sense they collectively contribute to the velocity of a whole area of motion. Rendering consolidates that sense of wholeness as it is carried out on the visible boundaries of a volume of particles generated by a simulation – a boundary between water and boat or water and sand, say. In the trench example, we are mostly looking at millions of data points which when rendered have the appearance of a moving surface of water. Describing the process for a simulation and rendering of a boat wake, which begins by first defining an area and then the conditions of the ocean (wave height and velocity, for instance), Adrienne LaFrance notes: From there, they’d run the simulation on the pre-determined ocean surface, to animate how that area of water responds to the boat. The output from that simulation – ‘millions of particles,’ essentially millions of new points of animation data – would then be smoothed into the final rendering of the film. (2017)

Comments such as these bring attention to the scale of the simulations, the number of particles generated computationally, which takes us to another dimension of the operational performance of Splash. LaFrance’s comments point to the connectivity that is also central to the work of the solver. Two aspects of connectivity in Splash are the most apparent. The first is the combined particle/grid computational method for APIC/Splash already outlined. The second is the human-data interaction evident as artists control the parameters of a simulation, as well as manipulate imagery across the production pipeline. Taking this view of Splash opens up another avenue of the performative entanglements of Splash and articulates a junction between digital and human scales, one that can be described as transcalar (Wood 2020). By transcalar I mean a digital image whose scale is such that it pivots our attention between its function as a narrative element and elicits an awareness of the different dimensions of human and digital capacities. The ocean in Moana is transcalar as it operates across both dimensions. On the one hand, the ocean is a depiction of a multifaceted element central to the story-world, while on the other it is a digital object created from billions of particles. Marlon West, Head

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of Effects for Moana, explains that Splash ‘used “millions, in this case, very often billions, of particles” to simulate water in a natural way’ (quoted in Franz 2017). West’s statement holds the two dimensions of human and digital perspectives together: billions of particles used to simulate water in a natural way. Having already interrogated the realistic qualities of water any straightforward notion of there being a natural way when it comes to water simulation can be challenged. Such a thing as natural water is subject to the same cultural expectations and computational compromises as realistic water. Consequently, we can hold open a gap between any simple association linking billions of particles and the simulation of natural water. With connectivity as a starting point for the performativity of Splash, Moana opens up to an analysis revealing a cultural and computational entanglement with the culture of connectivity which is so much part of our contemporary experience of a world mediated by digital technologies.

Moana and a culture of connectivity Connectivity is a word especially associated with the spread of mobile technologies, social media and the internet. The Internet of Things is a particular manifestation of the phenomenon, with digital technologies allowing us to be connected via mobile devices to emails, travel passes, pollen counts, trending memes, breaking news, interactive stores, central heating, lights, a myriad of entertainment platforms, including games, TV, films such as Moana and much more besides. Through mobile technologies, social media and the internet, we have become increasingly networked and part of a new social operating system (Rainie and Wellman 2012). Julia Hobsbawm notes that connectedness is not just a feature of digital technologies but is something that has accelerated as digital technologies have become increasingly widespread and evolved (Hobsbawm 2017). Indeed, Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias note of connections between computers that: ‘Connection . . . generates societies and economies that are integrated and ordered to an unprecedented degree’ (2019: 7). Hobsbawm, Couldry and Mejias, along with José van Dijck and Samuel Greengard are amongst many in arguing that our experience of each other and the world are re-shaped in a connected age (Dijck 2013; Greengard 2015). For José van Dijck the ‘culture of connectivity evolves as part of a longer historical transformation characterized by a resetting of boundaries between private, corporate and public domains’ (2013: 21). The production culture of Moana does not operate

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with the kind of scope as do the social media platforms van Dijck studies – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia – even so, the culture of connectivity evident in Moana and its disclosures can be explored via a focus on a re-setting of boundaries around software. In the material-cultural narrative of Moana’s assemblage software becomes unbounded. By paying heed to its place in a range of production disclosures, software can be displaced from its status as a neutral tool used by practitioners when they create the images necessary for a production. Instead, software is performative as a mediator around which different kinds of actions occur, an influencer giving shape to diverse social and organizational transactions. Nathan Ensmenger describes software as a heterogeneous technology: Software is perhaps the ultimate heterogeneous technology. It exists simultaneously as an idea, language, technology, and practice. Although intimately associated with the computer, it also clearly transcends it . . . Software is where the technology of computing meets social relationships, organizational politics, and personal agendas. (2012: 8)

There are many ways in which the software used in making Moana transcends computers though my focus remains here on the connective performativity of Splash. Through its relational entanglements Moana and its production disclosures reiterate and build up a narrative about connectedness. Moana’s culture of connectivity is heterogenous in that its material-cultural narrative can be drawn from across images of the animated feature, traditions and organizational structures at Disney, industry cultures and also the cultural specificity of Pacific Island cultures. This material-cultural narrative accumulates in disparate elements of Moana’s production assemblage running between the connective performativity of software, discussions about data volume and distributed computing, collaborative practices and the seamless integration of VFX elements within a scene. All of these connections are reinforced as they sit within the further context of collaborative and constructive sharing between studios, claims made about collaborative engagement with the Oceanic Trust, a grouping of Pacific Island experts who informed the production team, and also the Pacific Island cultures whose mythology informed the story-world of Moana. As it seems to put forward a neutral view of connectivity this material-cultural narrative can promote an uncontested view of a cultural and computational horizon that celebrates the potentiality of digital technologies to mediate our view

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of the world. To unravel this culture of connectivity I return first to Splash and its operational functionality, before moving out to its performative connections with other elements in the assemblage of Moana’s production. The particle/grid computational method previously described is fundamental to the operation of the solver and the method grounds its performativity in data connectivity. In solvers using the particle/gird methods there is a mismatch of information carried by a single particle in comparison with a multiple point grid system. This mismatch leads to a loss of information when the computational method passes between the multiple point grid and the single particle system (Zhu and Bridson 2005). Creating the numbers of particles necessary for Moana’s water simulation is a computational feat and comes with the potential for huge information loss. The design of Splash aims to keep such information loss to a minimum and ensure that the simulations are achieved efficiently. Through the maximization of data connectivity there is less dissipation of velocity and fewer instabilities occur in a particle simulation. Splash was also designed to enhance connectivity based on human-data interaction through the capacity for artists to control the parameters of a simulation and so to generate a diversity of flow. As we have seen, comments on the production’s workflow draw attention to extensive human-data interactions (Palmer et al. 2017). The pipeline ensured a flow of data between different parts of the production team in order to meet the demands of production requiring a large amount of VFX shots. With the emphasis again on efficiency, this time in the workflow process, attention is drawn to both connectivity and collaboration. Explaining how the different departments in the pipeline collaborated Palmer et al. note: The Layout Department sculpted the shapes to hit compositional goals. The Animation and Effects departments worked in collaboration to determine character performance. In particular working together to identify how much movement was to be done in animation, prior to effects simulations and treatments being added. Providing broad stroke movements, and establishing timing, Animation played a key role in making sure the foundation of the character worked for the shot direction, and the Effects Department. (2017)

The production required this re-design of workflow because of the sheer amount VFX shots in Moana. Explaining the necessary step up in capacity commentaries often stake out a claim about the scale of computational work required. For instance, Technical Supervisor Hank Driskell describes Disney’s animated

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feature Big Hero 6 as a VFX movie because 46 per cent of the animation required VFX shots with Moana representing a further step up since it had 80 per cent VFX shots, many of which were of the ocean (Robertson 2016b). Writing about making the channel of water in which Moana returns Te Fiti’s heart the production team advance a claim about their ability to manage the task through their workflow design which was based on both the flow of data and accessibility to artists: Our flexible and robust level set compositing workflow, coupled with the automation of common simulation setups, allowed for easy creation and use of our water assets. These tools helped us deliver water at a scale and complexity that was beyond anything we had previously attempted. Our pipeline created water with a high level of nuance and artistic finesse, from the close-up caress of a hand on the ocean’s surface, to a giant churning wall of water, out to the line where the sky meets the sea. (Palmer et al. 2017)

These comments draw attention to different kinds of connectivity: data connectivity via automation and human-data interaction via artist control. It refers not only to the performativity of Splash but also the performativity of the modular pipeline, which too involves connection and collaboration in a flow of work. Interestingly, this connection and collaboration within the flow of work is also noted to be a contributor to the look of the water. Frost, Stomakhin and Narit, for instance, suggest: ‘These aspects were key to enabling artists to make the water to feel natural, yet exist in a world far from that’ (2017). With commentators relating how a billion particles could be generated during a water simulation it becomes evident that Splash generates huge amounts of data and this in turn had an impact on storage and computational capacity. Reflections on the former give a sense of scale of data in terms of tera and petabyte:4 The limited simulated regions still required several terabytes of storage per simulation (the largest had over one billion particles and required over 20 TB to store). Our simulation disk volume was over a petabyte, an order of magnitude larger than any prior show, but we still nearly hit its capacity several times during production. (Palmer et al. 2017)

The number of powers of ten of petabytes (1015 or 1,000,000,000,000,000) is quite hard to get one’s head around so another way of thinking about the amount of data generated is in terms of computational power. Simulating billions of particles for the water not only produces a large amount of data but also requires

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a huge amount of computing power and to generate those billions of particles the production used distributed computing. Referring specifically to Splash, Hank Driskill describes how the team used distributed computing because it ‘allowed our new solver to run on multiple machines at once and have them all be talking to each other as they’re solving this water problem as if it’s being solved on one giant machine’ (quoted in Lee 2016). This was especially the case on the water channel sequence described earlier in which the scale of work necessary to generate such large numbers of particles meant using distributed computing: ‘The scale of the environment meant conventional solutions struggled to process over such distances. Distributing the simulation gave us access to the much needed RAM required, a key feature of Splash’ (Frost, Stomakhin and Narit 2017). The operation of Splash in which large amounts of RAM were required to process the grid/particle exchange central to the computation worked best on a network of distributed computers. Driskill puts the scale in context by comparing a home computer to the computational power needed for Moana. A typical home computer has between one and four cores. On Disney’s previous production Big Hero 6 peak usage was 55,000 cores and for Moana: ‘Our high on this movie is 76,000 cores running full tilt’ (quoted in White). The performativity of Splash again involves connectivity, this time in a network of computers communicating with one another. Distributed computing takes us beyond the workings of an individual machine to a network of machines whose workload generates an environmental impact. Though not a concern explicit in the production culture material quoted here there would have been a significant cost in terms of carbon footprint. So far in this analysis connectivity emerges through Splash’s particle/grid method of computation, the different elements of a pipeline and distributed computing reliant on computers linked together to manage a high load of computation. Connectivity also comes into play in descriptions of a seamless integration of elements during the composition of images for the final version of the animation. The character-like water protrusions, for instance, are composed from layers of animation and water simulations. As Head of Effects Animation, Dale Mayeda explains: We wanted to make the interior of the surface feel believable and feel alive. And so if you can imagine taking, let’s say, a clear plastic bag and filling it with water and then kind of shaking it up, you’d have some churning bubbles swirling around on the inside. So we would do the same thing with this character, where

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we would run a fluid simulation on the interior. Once you take all of these pieces together and combine them, then you start to get a lot more of a believable water character’ . . . ‘In addition to having the water character feel like water, we also wanted it to feel very integrated as part of the ocean. We didn’t want it to feel like some sort of sea creature coming out of the water, we wanted it to feel like it was the water and the ocean.’ (quoted in Lee 2016)

Mayeda’s comments outline the practicalities of producing interior simulations of churning water and bubbles, which would then be combined with the external simulation of splash and white water. He also emphasizes the visually seamless integration of these different kinds of water simulation. As you would expect in a commercial feature such as Moana the effort of achieving this connectivity is visually erased from the surface of the image but it emerges again in the production culture. We see it in discussions of how the integration of digital elements was essential to the many shots in which a boat crashes through waves, crests over the tops of waves, or when characters such as Moana or Māui dip their fingers into the water as part of their wayfaring. The close detail work on splashes is described as complex and explanations give insight into the process of connecting the different components of the sea and the role of Splash. As described by Hank Driskill, larger ocean waters are reasonably well understood as a series of mathematical equations and solving these equations is straightforward. By contrast, simulating water interacting with other objects is more complex and treated within a section of water separated out from the whole ocean. As Driskill elaborates: The boat interacting with the water is where things get interesting, and the water does much more interesting things. So we effectively slice out a chunk of water around the boat to do the more interesting solve, and that’s where Splash kicks in and does the more interesting effects. Then we integrate that back into the larger body of water – the boat is interacting with the ocean and it’s causing a wake behind it, and splash and spray, and yet it still feels like it’s part of this larger integrated whole. (quoted in Lee 2016)

Separating out an ocean section on which to visually cue complex interactions between a boat and water entails treating water as a series of discrete but connected parts and not a continuous whole. The area of interaction is isolated, the movements of water and details of splashes finessed by the animation and VFX teams, with the two sections finally spliced together again. Blending such elements together is technically difficult, as Ben Frost describes when noting

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the time spent developing appropriate techniques to enable the team to put the modular components together: A lot of time was spent finding techniques to make the seams of each component work together. Using procedural workflows with assumptions based on bounding boxes, cut out shapes, and UV position to automate positional blends we could get pretty far, although manual refinements were often required to minimize the visibility of the seams. (quoted in SideFX 2017)

Across these last three disclosures which reference realism, believability and integrating elements of the image, the performativity of Splash is entangled with a professional narrative of success against adversity (the scope of the task, integrating the different elements of the image). In this scenario connectivity is a key function of the solver (and pipeline) operation. Splash is entangled too with disclosures which reference connectivity in numerous ways such as blending, interaction, combining and networks. In all of these disclosures, connectivity is actioned through the operations of the software. As a consequence, connectivity becomes the wider performativity of the software too. With connectivity reiterated across different areas of the production as an ability to ensure seamless integration of complex shot elements, the management of a huge computational load and the generation of a vast amount of data, the software starts to perform another role. In this role the performativity of Splash becomes part of a cultural and computational horizon in which the potentiality of digital technologies to pervasively connect is reiterated. Going further, the entanglements of Splash and its connective performativity circulate beyond the pipeline and composition of the images. Rob Kitchen comments ‘it is most productive to conceive of algorithms as being contingent, ontogenetic, performative in nature and embedded in wider socio-technical assemblages’ (2017: 16). The production of Moana is one such socio-technical assemblage and it spins out beyond the pipeline and assembly of images. Disney’s presentation of its identity as a twenty-first-century studio is informed by an agenda of connectivity worked through in the form of collaboration. In 2019 Disney acquired 20th Century Fox but at the time of Moana’s release was part of a conglomerate with Pixar and Industrial Light and Magic. By the time of Moana’s release Disney’s public relationship with Pixar and ILM had moved towards one of consolidation with the antagonistic relationship evident in the early history between Pixar and Disney set aside (Stewart 2006; Price 2009). Instead, there was an emphasis on a shared culture of innovation with a refrain

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of both stepping up in terms of innovation and also a collaborative connection between Disney, ILM and Pixar. Hank Driskell, Technical Supervisor on Moana comments: ‘We wanted to take a step up from what we had done before,’ explains Hank. ‘Thankfully, we have two sister companies, Pixar and ILM [Industrial Light & Magic], and we were able to have early conversations with them. Our pipelines aren’t shared, and what we’re pursuing isn’t the same. But, they helped give us ideas.’ (quoted in Robertson 2016b)

In another commentary on this conversational connection Driskill goes further noting that the interaction serves the purpose of not only sharing ideas but also of agenda setting. While it is true that these quotations do not explicitly mention software, it remains central to the transactions and the claims about the power of the sister companies: It’s really great, one of the perks of Disney is we have these two great sister companies with Industrial Light and Magic and Pixar. And whenever any of us embark on films, we often start, as our teams are first starting to come together, with some early conversations about the challenges, and just sort of defining between the three places what is state of the art, what are the upper boundaries, and then can we pass them? It’s kind of this fun, creative one-upmanship that we do, and then get excited when they do it, too. (quoted in Lee 2016)

This ethos of connection and collaboration continues with outward-facing claims about sharing knowledge with the industry more widely.5 Ed Catmull, then president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios,6 and interviewed when Pixar’s Finding Dory was released just four months before Moana states: Disney, ILM, and Pixar have open-sourced a number of things. I believe strongly in participating in a wider community. Secrets are less important than having a healthy industry. We’re not a big industry. We have very high visibility because of what’s made, but there aren’t that many companies. That’s one reason we have always published. For the last few years there have been more papers from the Disney companies than any other place because we believe in sharing. (quoted in Robertson 2016c)

These statements by Hank Driscoll and Ed Catmull first place an emphasis on collaboration within the three companies then forming the Disney conglomerate and second show the company staking a claim for sharing more widely within the industry. Since the sharing is often around software developments the

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latter is a relational element that influences such narrative transactions. These identity formation statements for Disney, ILM and Pixar also serve to leverage an emphasis on their innovative work, trading again on the currency of their software developments, for instance, Hyperion, Matterhorn and RenderMan. As the subject of several papers published by the studio around 2017, many of which I use in this case study, the specific development of Splash for Moana contributes again to this self-presentation of an innovative identity for Disney. The identity formation statements contribute to a contradictory politics of selfpresentation within Disney and more widely in the VFX industry. Giving the appearance that once competing studios now work together through creative one-upmanship generates an image of a powerhouse of innovation. The claim about sharing knowledge through publication offsets the implication that Disney is too big to compete with and dominating the marketplace. In 2019, when Disney took over 20th Century Fox, which included competitor Blue Sky Studios, the question of Disney’s market dominance gained further traction. Subsequently, Blue Sky Studio has been closed down an action Disney claimed to be a consequence of the pandemic: ‘Given the current economic realities, after much consideration and evaluation, we have made the difficult decision to close filmmaking operations at Blue Sky Studios’ (quoted in Giardina 2021). The theme of connectivity is not only confined to the production disclosures as it is also embedded in the story-world of Moana. This in turn adds to how we come to understand connectivity within the production’s assemblage. Throughout the animation a creeping darkness is seen spreading widely, emptying the ocean of life and as it encroaches further on the land, destroying crops and forests. The prologue to Moana shows the darkness starting to emanate from Te Fiti immediately after Māui stole her heart. As Moana travels towards Te Fiti and closes in on Te Kā we see the darkness originating from the lava monster. In this sequence Moana recognizes that Te Kā and Te Fiti are connected, they are one in the same being. The act of visually creating a channel underlines her understanding that Te Kā and Te Fiti are the same entity and builds further on the connectedness between land and sea and its inhabitants evident within Moana. With Te Kā vanquished and her other persona Te Fiti re-established the spreading destruction is immediately reversed as the charred spiral around her heart blooms with flowers and green spreading outward. Publicity for the animation suggests that the theme of connectedness within the narrative of Moana arose from Disney’s pre-production research. The research was undertaken in consultation with the Oceanic Story Trust, a group

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of Pacific Island academics, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, historians, tattoo masters, navigators, fishermen, elders and artists (Robinson 2016). On the basis of this collaboration the studio’s publicity disclosures maintained that the feature combined Disney storytelling with an authentic version of Pacific Island culture. Osnat Shurer, Moana’s producer remarks: But, we couldn’t imagine the beauty of the people. When we listened to the people, that’s when we touched the beauty of the Pacific Islands. It changed the story, and it changed us. We met archaeologists, weavers . . . many people. We learned that the ocean unites the islands; it doesn’t divide them. We created an Oceanic story tribe that we checked in with on story and design choices. (quoted in Robertson 2016a)

Adrienne LaFrance too describes how Shurer was struck by the connectedness with Pacific Island culture. As LaFrance explains: Shurer and her colleagues were also struck by a larger theme of connectedness from the Pacific Islanders they met – and the way many island cultures see the land and sea as indistinct. (In ancient Hawaii, for instance, this idea was encapsulated in the concept of ahupuaʻa, divisions of land that run from the mountain down to the ocean.) And also the extent to which some cultures view the ocean itself as a connective force. (2017)

This perspective on connectivity is reinforced in the bonus feature material for Moana with anthropologist Dionne Fonoti commenting: ‘In the Pacific, we don’t consider the water a barrier to each other. It’s not just the cultures of the people and the islands that connect us, it’s also the ocean that connects us.’ Across both the production culture and the story-world of Moana there is an emphasis on connectivity. Some of this is aligned with Pacific Island mythology and some with the performativity of the software. Through these different dimensions Moana’s culture of connectivity reveals itself to be heterogenous and furthermore sits in conjunction with claims about realisticness. Even though spread across diverse elements the two cohere as a narrative which projects a cultural and computational horizon in which potentiality of digital technologies to accurately depict the world remains apparently uncontested. Writing about what data scientists call the value of perfect information, or the ability to align data points, collection, analysis and so deliver deep insights through say, simulation and weather forecasting, Samuel Greengard notes: ‘Achieving this goal is incredibly challenging because it’s extraordinarily difficult to gather all the data required form perfect information and then build an algorithm that

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takes into account all the variables in the right way’ (2015: 55). Unlike the caveats evident in Greengard’s views on simulating weather Moana’s production culture offers an optimistic perspective on digital technologies and its capacity to simulate natural phenomena such as water. The water in Moana is neither wholly realistic nor magical. To call it realistic denies the mixture of cultural and computational influences contributing to how it looks and maps our attention on a simple equation between image and actuality. Likewise, framing it as magical maps water onto the traditions of innovation in animation. While both of these facets are to be celebrated, they again do not entirely account for what we see on the screen. Exceeding these two terms water in Moana offers a different view on realisticness and connectivity. I mentioned before that we can only be indirectly aware of simulated particles once they are rendered. Particles have the appearance of being connected when rendering consolidates the impression of wholeness that comes from adding shade and reflection and surface textures to a volume consisting of many millions of particles. I have not touched on the rendering of images and photorealism as my emphasis has been on the motion of water created using simulations. I turn to it now through a description of photoreal rendering because it offers an interesting choice of word to describe the simulated water of Moana. Digital effects supervisor Kyle Odermatt, commenting on the stylized realism of the lighting and rendering of the water created using Hyperion, remarks that though the water might appear very realistic its lighting is in fact very stylized. Usually an ocean surface reflects a lot of the sky but for Moana the team wanted to be able to see further into the water than occurs in actuality. Odermatt says: It’s not something you realize until you see before and after. But it is a thing that is a pure artistic choice, because we want the water and our scenes with water to feel like that place you want to be. If you go to one of these islands, you come away and you’re like, ‘Wow, that lagoon was super colorful like that.’ They don’t tend to be quite as colorful as we make them. So we want aspirational imagery. It’s very, very controlled in a way to make it appealing, even though our technology certainly supports the ability to do something that is absolutely photoreal. We just choose to drive it in a slightly different direction. (quoted in Lee 2016)

Odermatt’s choice of the word aspirational to describe the imagery which was created in a very controlled and appealing way is also an appropriate one for describing the visual pull of simulated water. Crafting the movement of water

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relies on an enormous amount of human and computational labour. Wrapped up in a wider appeal to optimistic connectivity, the imagery aspires to evoke a culture of connectivity as seamless and unquestioningly capable of depicting an accurate version of the world.

Conclusion There is little in Moana and its production disclosures to contest aspirational imagery. The production disclosures I have discussed in relation to water simulation are not simply neutral explanations, their primary function is an offering of positives for variously marketing the animated feature to audiences, marketing the software across the industry and also promoting the Disney Studio as populated by influential innovators. Rather, they are a rich resource for the relational analytic perspective I develop here. By exploring software through the perspective of performativity, we can trace out and interrogate the ways software becomes entangled in studio identity, a culture of connectivity and a horizon of imagination in which the world can be computationally modelled. All these facets of Moana’s assemblage expose how software is both caught up with and authorizes the claims of different sets of disclosures. With these ideas in place it becomes possible to resist the seamless perspective that often circulates around algorithms. Ed Finn writes: For every step that computational systems take in mastering a new field of practice, from understanding natural speech to composing music, humanity also takes a step to close the gap. We shape ourselves around the cultural reality of code, shoring up the facade of computation where it falls short and working feverishly to extend it, to complete the edifice of the ubiquitous algorithm. (2017: 190)

Given the argument I have presented, we do not have to shape ourselves around the cultural reality of code. We can instead find ways of seeing software for what it is. It is not just an often-sophisticated toolset for making images nor a neutral vehicle for collaboration. It is part of a complex interplay of influences. Rather than buying into claims about the realisticness of simulated images on the screen, we can see software as markers of converging cultural, organizational and technological influences. These are revealed in materialcultural narratives in which the potentialities of software become inflected

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with the agendas of people and institutions. Just because algorithms are opaque to most of us does not mean we are unable to remain alert to agendas in play. To be sure, images can be visually distracting, stunning in their technique, design and their capacity to tell a story. Indeed, the place of storytelling is made explicit by Marlon West: In the end, calibrating between those two expectations – a realistic-looking ocean that could also convey subtle warmth and encouragement as a character – meant keeping a portion of the water unnaturally smooth and rounded when it surfaced as a character. Also, there were moments when obeying the laws of physics were discarded in favor of keeping the audience focused on the characters. ‘Because it’s storytelling,’ West told me. ‘It’s a stylized world. And we’re trying to create water that exists in your heart and your mind’s eye.’ (quoted in LaFrance 2017)

West’s comment on calibrating between two expectations contests the frequent appeals for seeing the water as straightforwardly realistic. All images of water are telling us a story whether on screen or as of part a material-cultural narrative generated within a production’s culture. None are depictions of a world that close a gap between a simulation and actuality. Rather, they are depictions that fill a gap with claims we can interrogate, claims about realisticness and connectivity too. In the end we do not have to be party to any completion of what Finn calls the edifice of a ubiquitous algorithm. It is more than possible to be proactive and find ways of exposing how and why that edifice is made.

Notes 1 This early scene highlights how the design of the characters draws on a different stylistic convention than the water. Aside from the character-like water figures, water animation in Moana creates movements and flow which link to live-action cinema. By contrast, Moana and Māui fit within the traditions of CG-animation with stylized shapes, movements, gestures and textures. 2 The animation of Te Kā also includes fluid simulation of the lava and smoke. Jiang et al., describe how their APIC/Splash method was also suitable for creating the detail of the lava flows (2015). 3 Whereas Moana’s characterization has been widely applauded, there has been a significant amount of criticism of the figure of Māui and other elements of the animation (Thompson 2018).

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4 For most of us the size of a petabyte of data is hard to comprehend. It would take 5.7 years to download 1 petabyte of data at 50 mbps or 3.4 years of 24/7 Full HD video recording. 5 Since 2016, when Moana was released, Disney have expanded further through the purchase of Fox which brought the New York-based animation studio BlueSky into the ‘family’ of the studios. BlueSky has since closed down. 6 Ed Catmull retired in July 2019. A long-time figure in the computer effects industry, Catmull received four Oscars for his work. In 2020 he was awarded the prestigious Turing Award along with Pat Hanrahan for his pioneering work on computergenerated imagery.

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Generating places

Questions of scale arise in all sorts of ways when talking about automated animation processes. The water simulation in Moana combines automated processes with art direction to create the images of ocean waves, splashes and sprays in a process involving ‘tens of millions, if not billions of particles’ (Marlon West quoted in Franz 2017). As we saw in the previous chapter creating simulations based on such large numbers of particles is only possible through computation and distributed computing. Paying attention to the transcalar qualities of the ocean in Moana entails becoming aware of the different scale of digital imagery and pivoting between what is depicted on the screen and processes behind its production. The video games No Man’s Sky (2016–) and Everything (2017) were created using the automated animation process of procedural generation and so are again transcalar. In the following two chapters I explore the material-cultural narratives of the games by analysing both their production disclosures and also the games and argue that each offers a different perspective on digital scale. Scale is invoked in the marketing of both No Man’s Sky and Everything. Central to their pitch when developer Hello Games premiered the first trailer for No Man’s Sky, the scale of the game immediately caught the attention of commentators within the gaming community. Shown at the Spike Video Games Award event in 2013 (VGX 2013) the trailer opens on a black screen with the words (in white): EVERY ATOM PROCEDURAL. The word atom changes to leaf, tree, bird, fish, rock, ocean, cloud, ruin, star, sun, galaxy, planet, and then we see EVERY PLANET UNIQUE followed by EVERY PLANET UNEXPLORED. Game images are then shown, first from an underwater first-person perspective and then moving on to dry land where an extensive array of landscapes, colourful vegetation, creatures, spaceships, as well as travel into space are cut together to showcase possible planets to the rhythms of Debutante by 65 Days of Static. Owen Good for Kotaku stated the trailer stole the show at VGX and

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remarked on both the procedurally generated environments of No Man’s Sky and the scope of those environments: ‘The game is entirely procedural in all of the environments it creates, promising unique planetary environments, all of them unexplored. (2013). Writing just prior to No Man’s Sky launch in 2016 Sean Murray, the head of Hello Games, continued to flag the game’s procedurality and vastness by describing it as an ‘infinite procedural sci-fi-space-survival-sandbox’ (Murray 2016). In such statements Murray reveals that his vision of exploration relies on a sense of vast scale. Further publicity claims No Man’s Sky is potentially populated by so many planets that it is possible for individual players to be the first ever visitor to any particular part of its digital space, while at the same time never be able to visit every planet within the game. The marketing for Everything reveals a similar emphasis on scale with prerelease commentaries noting: The concept is a little huge to get one’s head around. It seems that in Everything, absolutely everything is a playable character. So if it exists in the game, it’s something you can play as. It’s an attempt to let you see the game’s world from every possible perspective. (Walker 2016)

On Everything’s release commentators often noted players could be anything in the game. In fact this is not entirely the case, though players can indeed jump into or enter a myriad of macroscopic and microscopic entities programmed to appear in the game. As Mitch Wallace of Forbes comments in an interview piece with Everything’s designer David OReilly: On that note, the game’s minimalist title isn’t being the least bit ironic, as Everything allows players to assume the role of, for the most part, anything imaginable. Countless animals and plants, spanning from bacteria and pollen to ostriches and elm trees. Land masses and molecules. Even assumingly inanimate objects, like torches, streetlamps and rocks, are fair game. It’s a compelling variation on the No Man’s Sky formula, but instead of discovering planets and beings, you’re instead becoming them, and quite literally so. (Wallace 2017)

The launch trailer for Everything released in March 2017 introduces potential players obliquely to this environment. Accompanied by the words of philosopher Alan Watts, the fly-through of the visuals show numerous variations of the game environment and its many entities. We shift from a sandy to pastoral environment viewed from sky high, creature or plant high, into a water environment and then outer space. The screen is populated by succulents, islands, beetles, rocks, butterflies, hot air balloons, pollen grains,

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elephants, fish eagles and turtles. All the while we hear the voice of Alan Watts, who intones: ‘When you come into this world, there gradually arose into being the sensation of I. And you feel that you are I just as I feel I am I. But everywhere, all the time there are other Is starting up . . .’ The launch trailer, while not showing much in the way of Everything’s mechanics, introduces entities, environments and the philosophy of interconnectedness that runs through the game. Trailers for games are marketing devices which introduce both the environment for play and usually give a taster of a game’s mechanics. These aim to entice players into buying the game by showing how they too can enter into an engagement with its game world. Game rules and mechanics are one route of player engagement amongst several. Game scholars argue that a number of different routes for player engagement co-exist including ludic or playing activities, narrative interest, as well as an opportunity for participating more widely in a gaming community. Ludic refers to ‘activity organised under a system of rules that defines a victory or defeat’ (Frasca 1999). And James Newman suggests: ‘it is the job of the player to deduce (or even impose) rules through exploration, invention and imagination’ (2012: 19). As for any game, accumulating awareness of a game’s possibilities by learning its rules and mechanics through play is central to the experience of No Man’s Sky and Everything. A player acquires information as they are guided to make decisions by the game’s interface which is usually first experienced in an opening tutorial sequence. No Man’s Sky prompts players in the tutorial sequence to carry out tasks and in carrying out the task (fix this or that, gather this or that, locate something), they get to know the mechanics of exploration and resource gathering central to the game. They also begin to get a sense of the scale of the game and how they are oriented within this digitally scaled space. Everything’s tutorial too prompts players by encouraging them to move through the landscape and ‘enter’ other entities within a level, click into the thought bubbles that appear in the entities’ environment, play excerpts from Alan Watts’ lectures and eventually move between levels. Such prompts give players information about the arrangements of space and the operability of interactive elements. In terms of game design ensuring these prompts are clear is central to a good player experience. User interaction design focuses on how, when and where to best present useful information to the player. In comments aimed at game designers, Jim Thompson and Barnaby BerbankGreen explain:

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Invisible Digital All digital games have an interface to enable the player to use them. At a basic level, this begins when the player loads the game and must navigate to the point where he [sic] starts to play. On-screen information is also presented to the player during gameplay – this is the graphical user interface (GUI). This may take the form of a head-up display, quite common in first-person games, or information such as statistics and hints. The design of this important information is crucial. A well-designed interface can add to the mood of a game before it is played. (2007: 92)

Thompson and Berbank-Green’s description gestures towards the ways an interface provides players with different kinds of information. They particularly note how a graphical user interface operates as a display and also generates mood and tone. Astrid Ensslin similarly describes the ways information in games exists in multiple layers which both enable and constrain how players interact with a game: Videogame interfaces contain multiple layers of information, as elements that enable interaction with the game are superimposed on the mediated game world. Such interactive elements are either static or dynamic: they are either accessible or displayed throughout the game, or appear context-dependently. . . . Videogame interfaces function metacommunicatively in two respects: they convey and enable communication, or interaction, with the game world, the system and its rules, and the enable and prescribe certain ways of in-game communication with other player-characters and non-player characters. (2011: 131)

As these authors suggest the video game interface is central in communicating information to players, whether in relation to the game world and its rules or with other player/non-player characters within a gamespace. Through these various modes of engagement, players become entangled with the technological and cultural influences that shape a player’s experience. A starting point for thinking about the process of engagement is the avatar, the on-screen figure through which a player engages with interactive elements on a screen. Avatars embed players in the sense that they establish the parameters through which we can look at and move through the multiple spaces of a game. Spaces can include many different types of interfaces, which variously give system information about inventories or status bars. Others include gamespaces, digital constructions of 2D or 3D space in which avatars are controlled by a player. In such spaces, activities and non-player characters controlled by the game system also appear. The visual and audio perspective and actions carried out through

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the avatar are one of the ways in which players are oriented within a game world. The initial releases of No Man’s Sky maintained a first-person perspective with the Next iteration of the game adding third-person perspective. A VR version, No Man’s Sky Beyond which was released in 2019, added a further immersive quality for players navigating the game’s terrain. The avatar of No Man’s Sky is a space traveller which can be modified by a player to have different body shapes, be human or alien, with some variation in the colour palette. The shift to third person allowed players to see their avatar rather than only seeing the gamespace through their perspective. Through the avatar the player is able to explore the many planets of the game as well as carry out numerous essential tasks. These include the mechanics of mining, trading, flying, fighting or building, amongst others. In addition to avatars, system-controlled characters with whom a player can interact as potential trading partners appear in the gamespace along with animals and drones.1 The avatar’s actions are based around human-like activities which take place at a human-tethered scale, albeit within a science fiction framework where space travel and transportation are accepted as the norm. By comparison, in Everything a player moves from entity to entity, from animal to mineral, from flower to tree, from planet to galaxy or from microbe to element. As they do so, players are encouraged to explore and experience the many relational dimensions of the game from the perspective of which ever entity they inhabit. There is not one avatar but many and each is equal to one another. The interactions available through this multi-entity array of avatars include moving through an environment and massing (or unmassing) or forming packs with other creatures and objects, singing and dancing, moving up and down levels that vary from the microscopic to macroscopic, accessing thought bubbles and voicecasts containing excerpts from the lectures of philosopher Alan Watts. The multi-entity activities offer a different perception of scale to that found in No Man’s Sky. Avatars orient players in the spaces of a game and are also the primary point of interaction with its playable elements. Avatars anchor a player into the opportunities available at specific moments in a game’s trajectory. When thinking about the social, technical and cultural possibilities of games, the figure of the avatar has offered games scholars many interpretive starting points. Avatars can be described in terms of their functionality and the skills needed by a player to maximize the effectiveness of that functionality in parlaying their place or prominence in a game and/or player standings. Avatars have also been approached in terms of their status as representations with questions of race,

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gender and sexuality active in commentaries and analyses of games (Shaw 2015; Malkowski and Russworm 2017). Indeed de Wildt et al. argue that the very term avatar invokes a sense of otherness, something that is exploited within game design (2019). When a game gives a player the opportunity to design their avatar these playable characters are also a site where questions of player identity are explored. For instance, avatars which are player designed are described by Lim, Liapis and Harrell as virtual identity representations (2016). Analysis of the choices available to and made by players, Lim, Liapis and Harrell argue, adds to our understandings of how both customization options and a player’s identity influence and constrain the ways in which player-designed avatars depict socially constructed variations of digital beings. Avatars are a site of emotional investment in other ways too. This investment can be based not so much around questions of identification but as an indicator acknowledging how much effort a gamer has put into playing a game. Discussing his sense of loss when his Minecraft (2011) avatar died, Brendon Keogh writes: When I fall into Minecraft’s lava and watch all my diamonds burn to nothing, the extreme and sudden sense of real loss I feel is primarily for those careful hours spent mining and working that are now going up in smoke. Character death acts as a fulcrum for the experience of temporality in videogame play, around which rhythms of progression and repetition hinge. (2018: 138–9)

The diverse approaches to avatars just outlined yield many insights into the ways players and games intersect, bringing into play a range of questions about engagement, identities, skills and their relations with social, cultural and technical concerns. Despite their differences, these modes of analysis treat an avatar as a depiction which plays a role in orienting the player and the game to the social, cultural and technological influences which impinge on both. As such, an avatar is encountered variously as an entity challenging a player to achieve the necessary skills for interacting with the many dimensions of a game, depicting the representational decisions behind a game’s design, or where an interplay between physically based and virtual identities are represented and different kinds of emotional investment are played out. So far I have talked about avatars and the direct engagement they offer players with a game. Engagement, though, is more than this. When playing a game players activate a wide series of relations outside a game as well as within it. Going beyond a focus solely on relations created by interactions with a game interface T. L. Taylor describes games as an assemblage of diverse relations:

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Games, and their play, are constituted by the interrelations between (to name just a few) technological systems and software (including the imagined player embedded in them), the material world (including our bodies at the keyboard), the online space of the game (if any), game genre, and its histories, the social worlds that infuse the game and situate us outside of it, the emergent practices of communities, our interior lives, personal histories, and aesthetic experience, institutional structures that shape the game and our activity as players, legal structures, and indeed the broader culture around us with its conceptual frames and tropes. (2009: 332)

Taylor’s perspective draws attention to numerous interrelations in any assemblage of a game, which include wider structures shaping a game and the activity of its players. That social, cultural and political influences run through games and through to players is addressed in various ways by other games scholars too, whether in terms of identity and representation (Malkowski and Russworm 2017), history and time (Chapman 2018; Hanson 2018), or culture and society (Bogost 2010; Galloway 2012; Muriel and Crawford 2018). Key to my study of No Man’s Sky and Everything is Taylor’s observation that players enter into an interrelation that runs between themselves and the technology of the gaming system. As Taylor’s assemblage suggests there are many ways in which we might think through the relationality of players and games, but following my discussion of simulation software for Moana I focus again on procedural technology. Procedural content generation (PCG) is used in No Man’s Sky to create terrain, flora and fauna. Everything is comprised of a series of procedurally generated scenes taking in seven different levels each with its own scale. The assemblage of each game has its own materialcultural narrative and I explore these as a way of examining how the games offer distinct perspectives on digital scales. To do this I layout the history and current context of procedural games and address the idea of procedural rhetoric already developed within games studies. I then move onto to discuss PCG in No Man’s Sky with a particular emphasis on scale by working with a range of production materials available online, including reviews and interviews with the production team of No Man’s Sky. The material-cultural narrative that emerges in No Man’s Sky’s assemblage demonstrates how, even though the transcalar qualities of PCG are very apparent, the difference of a digital scale is deferred as it is reconfigured into familiar conventions of human-scale time and space. Questions of scale in Everything’s assemblage are addressed in the following chapter.

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Procedural games Any computation using rule-based models is procedural and so broadly speaking video games of all kinds are procedural. PCG, a term often used interchangeably with procedural generation, refers to the generation of game content which typically means terrain, maps, levels, stories, dialogue, quests, characters, rulesets, camera profiles, dynamics, music and weapons (Yannakakis and Togelius 2011: 2). Through PCG content is created automatically or semiautomatically with limited or indirect input from human users: ‘It is a methodology for automatic generation of content of an entity, typically a game using algorithms or processes which can produce, due to their random nature, a very wide range of possible content related to the considered entity’ (Amato 2017: 16). In No Man’s Sky terrain, flora and fauna are created using PCG with the behaviours of these latter PCG creatures then generated through a pathfinding AI system. A brief overview of the history of PCG shows how the technology underpinning No Man’s Sky and Everything have come to be associated with exploration games and vastness. This was not always the case. The first uses of PCG were based on a pragmatic balance between data storage limitations and interesting gameplay. When a player begins a game level in non-procedural games a game engine often operates by calling a pre-made model from the asset library. In other words, the game engine draws on stored data which describes a fully modelled entity. By contrast, as Mark J. P. Wolf describes: Procedural generation takes place when content is created not by hand, but by algorithms, which use numerical seeds to mathematically generate content; this may, or may not, also involve randomization, depending on whether different output is required every time a world is generated. (2017: 288)

A design technique for games PCG has been around since at least the later 1970s and early 1980s. Rogue (1980) remains a famous example of these early games. Dungeon rooms and pathways between the rooms were procedurally generated with other content such as treasure and monsters placed randomly. Developed before graphical games were produced, Rogue led the way for the design of procedural games and instead of literal depictions, ASCII tiles defined where rooms, hallways, monsters and treasure were placed on the screen. Such was its impact that Rogue spawned the still-used descriptor ‘rogue-like’ games. The first iteration of graphical procedural games such as The Sentinel (1986) relied on fractals to generate landscapes which circumvented the computing power

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limitations of early game systems. In games such as The Sentinel and Elite (1984) the use of PCG allowed designers to create a game requiring very little data storage space and which consisted of multiple levels (Sentinel) or multiple planets (Elite). By using fractal systems designers were able to exploit repeat patterns and generate the larger pattern of a landscape. The upside was that fractals generated a relatively low data load within a system and so did not significantly slow it down. Though effective in expanding the scale of a gamespace the downside to early PCG was a repetitive visual quality evident in the fractal landscapes and planets. Such repetition had a tendency to reduce interest for gamers (Wolf 2017: 289–90). More recently PCG has moved from being a necessity to a design choice. Since the first phase of procedural games the storage capacity of computers has become much larger allowing more pre-modelled assets to be stored in a system’s library. These are then available to be drawn on by a game engine at any point in the game. Expansion of the capacity for data storage occurred first through the introduction of CD-ROMs (and later DVDs) and then via home computers with large storage capacity on their hard drives alongside increasingly powerful CPUs and GPUs. Continuing developments in both storage capacity and computational speeds within the domestic marketplace still aim to keep up the computational and storage demand of games available to download through sites such as Steam or PC Games. As gaming platforms including PlayStation and Xbox have evolved they too have been specifically designed to meet the processing demands of the increasingly photorealistic imagery of AAA games (games with a high budget, often produced by a larger studio such as EA or Sony as opposed to a small indie studio). With greater storage space objects and landscapes could be modelled on a computer by individual artists and preloaded into the game to be called up from a library at run time, rather than computationally produced at the moment it was required by the game system. In contemporary games PCG remains a choice for designers seeking to randomly alter content with the aim of maintaining a challenging experience for gamers by generating maps, levels, characters or other elements which are unique on every playthrough. Spelunky (2008), initially released for Windows and remade for Xbox in 2012 and designed to be playable on PlayStation 3 and Vita, is a randomly generated action-adventure game. Each time a gamer plays or restarts having died the game generates new puzzles, temptations and dilemmas. Commenting on Spelunky’s place on their list of the ‘50 Most Important PC Games of All Time’ the website PCGamer notes the game’s capacity for regeneration: ‘That takes all

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the frustration out of death, which in turn gives the game an excuse to be harder, which makes the challenges more engaging, which lets the random generation combine them in more fiendish ways’ (PCGamer 2016). As PCGamer’s insights make clear, the deadening repetition of early games has been left behind with PCG instead exploited to challenge player skills and heighten their interest. Many contemporary games include features just described for Spelunky by using PCG to add variation to the gameplay such as the action platformer Dead Cells (2017) or the turn-based strategy game Into the Breach (2018). In Future Unfolding (2017), an indie exploration game, puzzles are re-set when playing through the game for a second time. Designer Andreas Zecker notes: ‘The procedural variations keep the puzzles interesting even after you finished the game the first time. They are just different enough on replay, so that you don’t already know all the solutions by heart (2017).’ Similarly the VR horror game The Persistence (2018) is designed so that each time a player uses the teleport within the stricken starship that makes up the game world the maze-like arrangements of corridors re-set. Richard Moss takes Spelunky as an exemplar of PCG games arguing that it requires a different mode of engagement. For Moss, not only do players engage with content they are pushed to engage with the rules and systems. As he puts it in Game Developer’s overview of procedural generation: ‘By generating levels at runtime according to a simple formula, Spelunky pushes the gamer to master the rules and systems rather than the geometry of the game (Moss quoted in Game Developer’ 2016). Commenting on Dwarf Fortress (2006), another procedural game, Tanya Short similarly draws attention to the dozens of interconnected algorithmic systems, noting: ‘Most people see Dwarf Fortress as a creationist work of genius engineering, but it’s less like a combustion engine and more like a delicate mille-feuille,’ she says. ‘Each component has its own rules and obeys everything else’s rules, but by layering almost infinitely, complexity derives from their interactions – which is rather like our own universe. Less vision, more evolution.’ (quoted in Game Developer 2016)

Short’s comments are interesting for two reasons. She alludes to a sense of complexity of relations within an algorithmic system and she then maps this complexity onto the world in which we live as human beings. Such a mapping of procedural complexity onto evolutionary processes and human scale is repeated in other commentaries on PCG including No Man’s Sky. I argue later that this

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mapping is one of the ways in which the difference of the digital scale of PCG is reconfigured into a familiar human one. Since its release in 2011 Minecraft has become a pre-eminent PCG game with 176 million copies sold worldwide by May 2019 (Dent 2019). Minecraft offered a new type of procedural experience, as players used blocks representing various materials (dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water and lava) to build in a procedurally generated world. As well as building players can explore, gather resources and engage in combat. As Tremblay et​.​al note: In Minecraft the PCG is primarily concerned in the generation of the game world, i.e., which blocks are placed where. This generation is deterministic based on a seed value of the world. This means that two players using the same seed word will create the same world. (2014: 80)

Minecraft’s attraction lies not only in its vast world and world-building activity, it too involves players in numerous types of interrelations. Nate Garrelts too writes: Minecraft offers us something far more significant than pretend bowling in our living rooms . . . Minecraft weaves playing, gaming, roleplaying, image manipulation, chatting, and programming into a bundle that people write about, create videos about, and use as an inspiration for other types of projects. Minecraft is something else – a glimpse into the future of videogames. (2014: 4)

Garrelts’ comments suggest how the gaming community and ways of sharing across the many different facets of that community is also an important aspect of engagement. This exists beyond play too. Minecraft has often been used in educational and research contexts, for example, when teaching about sustainable planning, language and literacy, digital storytelling and computer art applications (Nebel, Schneider and Rey 2016). Something of a global phenomenon Minecraft brought attention back to the range of engagement opportunities PCG offers when crafting the kinds of vast worlds found in No Man’s Sky and Everything. A further attractive feature of PCG lies in its capacity to enable a studio or game designer to more cheaply generate game environments and to do so on a great scale. Making game content often requires teams of programmers, modellers, animators and sound engineers who are involved in a time-consuming process of creating models of game entities, animating some sets of movements and adding suitable sounds to the game entities’ activities. PCG offers the potential to overcome production bottlenecks. But, as Shaker, Togelius and Nelson wryly

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note, selling PCG on the basis that people in the game industry will be put out of their jobs is not a positive. They instead suggest a focus on how content generation can be exploited to augment the creativity of designers and artists: Another reason for using PCG is that it might help us to be more creative. Humans, even those of the ‘creative’ vein, tend to imitate each other and themselves. Algorithmic approaches might come up with radically different content than a human would create, through offering an unexpected but valid solution to a given content generation problem. Outside of games, this is a well-known phenomenon in e.g. evolutionary design. (Shaker, Togelius and Nelson 2016: 4)

For the design and creation of No Man’s Sky PCG brought the features of efficiency and creative possibilities together. The same is true of Everything. Touching briefly on the latter, Everything was created by game designer and animator David OReilly working in conjunction with programmer Damien di Fede. OReilly created the numerous avatar models and level details and di Fede wrote the programming necessary for the procedural generation of levels. Everything proved to be such a striking game that OReilly’s eleven-minute trailer won the Jury Prize for the 2017 Vienna Independent Shorts Festival and reached the longlist for an Academy Award nomination (Matulef 2017). The latter made Everything the first computer game to qualify for an Academy Award nomination. During the initial development stages of No Man’s Sky the core team involved at studio Hello Games was also very small. When working in such small teams using PCG lowers the cost of a game’s production and enabled the teams to achieve their aim of developing a vast game. In this brief history of PCG games procedural generation is central to the creation of the game world and consequently players engage in some way with procedural processes. Thinking about procedurality is already a part of games studies. Janet Murray in her influential (1997) work Hamlet on the Holodeck described computers as procedural systems noting: It [the computer] was designed not to carry static information but to embody complex, contingent behaviours. To be a computer scientist is to think in terms of algorithms and heuristics, that is, to be constantly identifying the exact or general rules of behaviour that describes any process, from running payroll to flying an airplane. (1997: 72)

Where Janet Murray draws attention to the behaviour of computers based on processes coded in algorithms, Ian Bogost subsequently introduced procedural

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rhetoric as an analytic approach. Acknowledging that video games are procedural in general he opted to examine the more specific case of procedural rules encountered during play. Bogost argues these rules reveal the cultural and ideological values embedded as dimensions of video games. As Olli Sotamaa explained: In other words, digital games are always intimately tied to the ways in which computers operate. Procedural systems excel in generating behaviours that are based on rule-based models. Rather than creating representations per se, software authors such as game designers write code that enforces rules to generate representations. Accordingly, much of the meaning of the game is argued to be encoded in the procedural rules. Simulation rules are allied to present embedded values, and by decoding and appropriating this ensemble, players generate the meaning. (2013: 5–6)

Procedurality as an analytic frame builds from a broad understanding of procedurality and computational processes: computers operate according to a set of rules established in the algorithms of their programming. Though procedural rhetoric starts from the premise of computational procedurality it is more concerned with how players engage with the rules of games rather than procedural processes. Miguel Sicart broadly formulates proceduralism as: interested in the ways arguments are embedded in the rules of a game, and how the rules are expressed, communicated to, and understood by a player. Via their simulation rules, games present embedded values, and it is the players’ appropriation and understanding of that model that make a game have meaning. (2011)

For Ian Bogost procedurality operates in a similar way. It is a means for understanding how processes such as the system of rules in a game make arguments and how these are understood by and influence players. Bringing in the added dimension of rhetoric Bogost comments: ‘my interest is in the function of procedural representation as it used for persuasion’ (2010: 52). To give an example, No Man’s Sky rules include mining and travel. If procedural rhetoric ‘is a technique for making arguments with computational systems and for unpacking computational arguments others have created’ (Bogost 2010: 4), in No Man’s Sky PCG contributes to a computational system which persuades players to mine. In persuading players to mine the game’s procedural rhetoric also leads to an encounter with the cultural politics of resource mining or perhaps asset stripping, territorialization and colonialism, a currency based on trading and so forth.

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Introduced in the early 2000s procedural rhetoric remains an influential approach. A series of articles using procedural rhetoric in relation to feminism and collaborative creativity, surveillance and video games, and religion and video games, argue that players engage with cultural and political dimensions embedded in a game through their engagement with rules (Phillips et al. 2016; Van Nuenen 2016; Šisler 2017). For critics of procedural rhetoric, however, rules-based analysis offers a too narrow conceptualization of engagement. As noted earlier Astrid Ensslin argues players are involved in a multimodal process when engaging with a game drawing on multitude of semiotic, kinetic and communicative strategies to identify ways of advancing in a game (2011). And for T. L. Taylor too engagement is modified by influences beyond the game occurring across an assemblage encompassing fans, production culture, industry, technology and commerce (2009). A number of recent studies deploy multimodal approaches to think about different facets of engagement seeing games themselves as a culture (Muriel and Crawford 2018), as bodily engagement (Keogh 2018), as affect (Anable 2018) and emotional engagement (Isbister 2016). Procedural rhetoric, then, has the virtue of opening up analyses of games and their cultural and ideological operations and so revealing their cultural narratives. While proceduralism has the potential to explain the operation of game rules and how they might seek to direct players in particular ways it is criticized for having a narrow view on player engagement. Players use a multitude of ways to advance in a game and equally a multitude of influences come into play when a player might take on the cultural narrative of a game (Ensslin 2011). Sicart argues it is important to avoid overstating the extent to which rules are a source of meaning. He opts instead for seeing players in dialogue with a game so that: ‘when a player engages with a game, we enter the realm of play, where the rules are a dialogue and the message, a conversation’ (Sicart 2011). Agreeing with Ensslin, Taylor and Sicart, I too understand engagement to be multifaceted, based on a range of relations between a player, the game and its wider context. Part of this context is computational and though the term procedurality is about computational processes, procedural rhetoric has surprisingly little to say about game technologies. As well as creating the functionality of a game the materialcultural narrative of computation is part of the relational operations of an assemblage through which both cultural and technological influences converge. Consequently, any algorithmic process is not a neutral influence on the rules of a game. Which is to say, game design and rulemaking within a game’s mechanic

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are not the only situations through which social and cultural influences become entangled with game technology. Such influences are also to be found in the software which makes a game’s mechanics possible. Building on my discussion of water simulation software in Moana my purpose is to develop an approach for saying more about the computational processes behind games and to explore the convergence of cultural and technological influences in the material-cultural narratives of games and their algorithms. A version of such a narrative is evident in Amanda Phillips discussion of the procedurality of Minecraft. Arguing that Minecraft’s algorithmic building of primary shapes comes to the surface in the visible dimensions the game, Phillips suggests that this opens up different ways of thinking about what we see on the screen: Although math is ultimately the foundation of all digital games, there is something about Minecraft’s open dedication to cubes and crafting recipes that help bring its abstract algorithms onto the surface. Aesthetically, the world is an homage to the simplest Cartesian formulation of space, invoking the graphs and grids of childhood mathematical training. Procedurally, the symbolic weight of the algorithm exists in the crafting function itself: the drive to use resources efficiently and to create ever more complex objects in the game world. Break trees into logs into planks into sticks to recombine them again as useful tools. (2014: 109–10)

With games such as No Man’s Sky and Everything tracing the presence of its algorithmic underpinning is less direct than what Phillips sees for Minecraft. Instead, I draw on the production culture of the games and examine the dimensions these bring to a material-cultural narrative. The use of PCG in No Man’s Sky and Everything generated a huge amount of interest within the game community and beyond. Each has an assemblage comprised of interviews and online presentations where the makers share details about the development of their game. The production material contained in these interviews and presentations is often accessible to non-programmers and makes it feasible to delve more deeply into entanglements around the procedural computation involved in creating the content of the game. Writing about Minecraft Tremblay, Colangelo and Brown comment: When discussing a game like Minecraft, it is important to avoid a simplistic division between the gameplay and community and the coding and architecture of the game itself . . . Minecraft [must] be understood in both the way it is played

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and talked about and the way in which its structure characterises that play. (2014: 84)

In saying it is important to avoid a division between gameplay, community, coding and architecture of Minecraft, Tremblay, Colangelo and Brown gesture towards the entangled approach I take here.2 The particular theme I explore in relation to No Man’s Sky and Everything is that of scale. Central to the ways in which the game is talked about by fans and reviewers, scale is essential to No Man’s Sky’s gameplay too and at the heart of the various PCG processes involved in its making. The same claim can be made for Everything. Tracing out the interrelations that run across gameplay, community and PCG, I show how the tension between human and digital scales is negotiated for each game. Commentaries, interviews and presentations are, as we already know, not neutral statements. They frequently operate as hero narratives featuring a game’s production as an epic endeavour and this is especially true when small teams are involved in making games. In commentaries, interviews and presentations, the discursive entanglements of No Man’s Sky and Everything emerge alongside the hero narratives in the materialcultural narrative surrounding the game.

Approaching No Man’s Sky From the very moment a player begins No Man’s Sky computational scale matters. When starting a new game a seed number is used to create the maths from which the universe will be procedurally generated for any subsequent position in the game. From the starting point onwards the maths is decided and the universe ‘exists’ in the form of potential computation. Since the same seed number is used for every start of the game (apparently the phone number of a member of Hello Games’ team) and the PCG is deterministic, the potential universe of No Man’s Sky is the same for all players. It contains the same multiple galaxies and numerous solar systems to the tune of 18.4 quintillion planets. As a player begins to travel, whether locally via foot or starship on their first planet or by flying off into the galaxy, the landscape or skyscape is procedurally generated according to the camera view of the avatar.3 Sean Murray in an 2014 interview with Game Informer described the game as having planets located in space with an orbit around a sun, planets on which you can walk in any direction, even the

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whole way around the globe (Game Informer 2014). Since the game design does not involve a skybox4 it is possible for players to travel to the planets seen from their location on any planetary surface, with the added presumption that there is a lot more of space out there so they can go far beyond what they see too. An appreciation of scale is central to approaching No Man’s Sky whether playing the game or looking at its production. By scale I mean both the extensive universe seen and experienced by players, the computational scale of procedural generation and the human-like scale through which No Man’s Sky’s avatar orients players. These different variations of scale co-exist in No Man’s Sky’s assemblage. But rather than standing alone, each is tempered as their contradictions converge in ways that displace our appreciation of a digitally scaled universe in favour of a human-scaled one. I see this displacement as an example of a wider process whereby digital interventions are interpreted through a closing loop. A kind of short circuit comes into play and the difference of digital is displaced by something more familiar. In reviews published just before and following No Man’s Sky’s release in 2016 much was made of the fact that PCG is used to generate the up to 18.4 Quintillion planets of the game. Roc Morin wrote in The Atlantic: Here, in a dim room half an hour south of London, a tribe of programmers sit bowed at their computers, creating a vast digital cosmos. Or rather, through the science of procedural generation, they are making a program that allows a universe to create itself. (2016)

Morin’s comments celebrate the labour of programmers as they strive to make a program that enables a universe to ‘create itself ’. On the release of the game commentators often contrasted the tiny indie studio of Hello Games and the scale of the universe generated (or potentially generated) by the game’s algorithms. This perspective is evident in Chris Baker’s praise of the scale of the game in Rolling Stone: The new release No Man’s Sky, created by the small team at U.K. indie studio Hello Games, presents players with a mind-bogglingly vast galaxy to explore. There are 18 quintillion planets in the game, a figure that’s almost impossible to wrap your head around. (2016)

Baker notes too that players have said it would take billions of years to visit every single planet, a claim often repeated by other commentators. In a similar vein, when reviewing the Next update released in July 2018, Justin Clark drew

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attention to the scale of the universe suggesting that No Man’s Sky is a gentle experience whose primary gimmick is awe: At its absolute best, No Man’s Sky is a measured, gentle experience where you are rarely the agent of change, but a perpetual visitor who’s constantly dwarfed by the magnitude of a universe neutral to your presence. It is not your job in these stories to colonize the universe. Your job is to comprehend it. Your job is to recognize the spirituality in it. The primary gimmick of No Man’s Sky, since day one, has been awe. (2018)

The vast scale of the game celebrated in the quotations earlier is only part of an experience offered by No Man’s Sky since the actions available to players via their avatars are also important. And as Oli Welsh rightly noted of the gameplay: ‘This is where it will prove most divisive because it turns out to be a nitty-gritty game of resource-gathering, crafting, upgrading, and inventory management’ (2016). Welsh’s commentary is worth looking at in more detail as he draws out some of the contradictions he experienced when playing the game. While responding to the spirit of exploration at the heart of the game, Welsh describes how a certain degree of boredom can set in when jumping from one planet to the next (an aspect of No Man’s Sky many have criticized) and goes onto to say: But then something great happens. As you get deeper into the game, you start to understand the algorithm’s language, and gain a keener appreciation of the parameters at work. Once you’ve visited a planet with an extreme weather system, where you need to sprint from your starship to nearby shelter; once you’ve discovered planets barren of all life, or rich in certain rare minerals you need, or infested with aggressive security drones that hound you if you so much as mine some iron; once you’ve had to puzzle out how to island-hop across an ocean planet where fuel for your ship’s launch thrusters is a rare find; then you start to really understand the character of a new world, and what it means for your endless journey into the stars. Land on a world with a mild climate, relaxed drone security, rich deposits and blue skies after a long string of harsh planetary encounters and you will feel the greatest joy of the explorer: the exultation of a great find. (2016)

Welsh begins with a reference to algorithms (those behind the PCG) and the procedural parameters at work. This somewhat abstract point quickly gives way to a focus on his experience of the algorithmically generated planets as fully formed places: a diversity of planets on which players often face the challenge to

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simply survive long enough to gather more resources in order to move on to the next planet and the adventures it offers a player. I emphasize Welsh’s comments because they give insight into the competing sense of scale that co-exist in many descriptions of No Man’s Sky. We often see claims which connect computation and its capacity to create a digital world on an enormous scale. At the same time game reviews and analyses shift this scale through a focused human-oriented experience, both through an impression of endless journeying and also the avatar-based labour of surviving in harsh environments. The relationship between these two scales remains somewhat opaque and follows a pattern often found in writing about the relationship between code and players’ experience of images on the screen. That is, any mention of code and algorithms generally remains at the level of their operational functions with their effectiveness at creating images held apart from their capacities to influence meanings embedded in a game. Beyond their generation of locations and content little connection is made between the contributions of PCG algorithms to experiences of play and the meanings attributed to a game. To make these connections more visible I return to relationality as this will allow me to say more about how the material-cultural narrative of PCG in No Man’s Sky informs engagement with the game.

Relationality I briefly outlined relationality in the introduction and turn again now to Malte Ziewitz’s position that attending to how algorithms matter is important for understanding their social and cultural entanglements (2016). The specific situations relevant here are the production disclosures surrounding the key PCG algorithms used in creating the planets, terrain and flora and fauna for No Man’s Sky. As my discussion of Moana explained software and algorithms can be described in different ways, as code, through its operations (its functionality or capacity to generate terrain) and also its performativity in different situations. For No Man’s Sky such situations are accessible in the many production culture disclosures produced by Hello Games and also in commentaries and review materials. Design decisions, the underpinning technology of procedural terrain generation, the wider circumstances of the game’s production and alignments with cultural discourse are all influences from which the performativity of PCG emerges. Considering its performativity accounts for the ways PCG gathers and

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shapes meaning through its material and discursive entanglements within the No Man’s Sky assemblage. But rather than only giving an account of performativity of PCG and procedural generation in this chapter I look at how that performativity becomes a nexus for a negotiation between digital and human scales. Materialist approaches argue humans are relational. We exist in intricate meshworks of connection running between everyone and everything with which we come into contact, whether human and non-human, animate or inanimate. When conceived as relational all beings are understood through their connections with other entities in the world. Relationality has consequences for how we think about objects too. Human and non-human objects neither stand alone nor exist autonomously; instead, they co-exist within a situation and co-produce activities together. In other words they are entangled with each other. Exploring software as entanglements between technological objects and humans we can tease out the re-configuration of digital scales found in the production cultures of games. Tim Ingold’s writing on materiality is worth looking at as a starting point for thinking more about relationality and entanglement (2012). Ingold builds his argument by asking a seemingly simple question: what is material? His answer includes references to atoms making up an element such as copper or silver or molecules making up a compound such as salt (sodium chloride) or water. The example of water immediately complicates any seemingly straightforward description of material since water exists in different states: as a solid (ice), a fluid (water) and a gas (steam). Water is a relatively simple molecule in terms of its chemical composition of two hydrogen atoms to one oxygen atom – H2O – but its complexity is clear in that it exists in different states. Furthermore, water in its different states acts in different ways. Ice is cooling and coats surfaces whereas steam burns and dissipates in air. To make a distinction between water in these states Ingold shifts from thinking about what a material is to what a material does stating: ‘In short, materials are what they do’ (2018: 62). Continuing through a perspective informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s work, Ingold approaches materials in terms of their potential to ‘become something’ through an interaction with an artist, crafts person or chemist: ‘Every material, in a way, is a becoming – it’s not an object in itself but a potential to become something’ (2018: 61). Importantly, the process of becoming something is not a question of a human craftsperson simply imposing their ideas on the form of a material (literally, mind over matter) but is emergent from a meeting of the potentials in the material and artist. This is a way of talking about entanglement.

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For instance, imagine an artist who approaches a material with their creative practice in mind; the something created emerges out of the possibilities afforded by the material and the evolving responses of the artists as the twofold together within specific situations. The forward momentum of transforming something from one thing into another is a consequence of a convergence of possibilities: This, I think, is what making is all about: it’s not imposing form on material but finding the grain of the way the world is becoming and then turning it this way or that in order to make it match what your own evolving purpose, as a designer or maker, might be. (Ingold 2012: 435)

Though Ingold is talking about materials such as metal, stone or wood, this way of thinking about materials is also relevant for procedural software. It exists as code but its potentialities are diverse. How those translate into imagery depends on the ways game designers opt to work with a software’s affordances and possibilities, something we have seen in relation to Splash in the previous chapter. Looking in detail at Ingold’s discussion of materials and materiality is productive beyond acknowledging that craft occurs through a folding together of potentialities of material and artist in a meeting or dialogue of a kind. His emphasis on relations between posits a different way of conceptualizing humans and non-human objects, one that is central to materialist approaches more widely. In his project to re-conceptualize objects Ingold proposes to rename objects as things. Ingold argues the word object is taken to mean something defined by an assumption of completeness, something that exists in an already known final form: Anything we come across could, in principle, be regarded as either an object or a sample of material. To view it as an object is to take it for what it is: a complete and final form that confronts the viewer as a fait accompli. It is already made. Any further changes it may undergo, beyond the point of completion, consequently belong to the phase of use or consumption. (2012: 435)

Objects here are ‘completed forms that stand over and against the perceiver and block further movement’ (Ingold 2012: 439). This point matters because taking objects to be already complete erases the complex ways in which we reach a relational understanding of both objects and ourselves in the world. To contrast against the stasis of objects Ingold evocatively describes things as ‘gatherings of materials in movement’ (2012: 439), a phrase alert to change and the formative

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processes through which materials become something. As Ingold puts it: ‘To understand materials is to be able to tell their histories – of what they do and what happens to them when treated in particular ways – in the very practice of working with them . . . Materials, thus, carry on, undergoing continual modulation as they do so’ (Ingold 2012: 434–5). Behind Ingold’s distinction between objects and things is an emphasis on relationality, how our understanding of things is entangled when they are transformed by and transform situations. For the sake of simplicity, I opt to continue to use the word object but approach them as always entangled and open to transformation. To make this all less abstract I return to No Man’s Sky. If taken as a complete and static object No Man’s Sky is the game released in August 2016 for PlayStation 4 and Windows (via Steam) with the tag: ‘a game about exploration and survival in an infinite procedurally generated galaxy’ (No Man’s Sky n.d.). But any game, No Man’s Sky included, is always more than this simple tag suggests. As noted earlier, games scholar T. L. Taylor describes games as assemblages, constituted by interrelations between technological systems and software, the material world, the online space of the game, game genre and its histories, the social worlds that infuse the game and situate us outside of it, the emergent practices of communities, our interior lives, personal histories and accumulated aesthetic experience (Taylor 2009). As Taylor’s list shows there are numerous potential interrelations which can modulate both our understanding of a game and the materiality of that game. Within its assemblage No Man’s Sky forms relations across a series of alliances. As a consequence our comprehension of the video game transforms and so does its status in relation to the wider gaming community. To expand. The game was initially developed by a small team at Hello Games. Needing further funding the studio reached an agreement with Sony. Sony’s financial contribution to the project was to enhance promotion and marketing including increasing the game’s visibility by enabling the smaller studio’s involvement at the centrepiece event of 2014’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3 – an annual premiere trade event). Being part of the centrepiece event is not usually possible for a small studio producing indie games. The benefits to Hello Games are clear, greater visibility and a larger market in which to pitch their game. Looking at relations running the other way Sony opted into what they presumably thought would be the next big move in games development: PCG. The opportunity also brought the larger studio into contact with the indie credentials of Hello Games and its potential for further expanding Sony’s sales base. In the

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pre-release period studio head Sean Murray made many media appearances including The Late Show with Steve Colbert, the studio released iterations of trailers throughout 2014–16, and Murray attended developer showcase events including the Game Developers Conference (GDC), Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and VGX. The publicity surrounding these appearances lead to great anticipation amongst the gaming community for the procedurally generated landscapes of No Man’s Sky. Through Hello Games’ relationship with Sony No Man’s Sky transformed from an intriguing experiment created by an indie studio with a good track record (they had already had success with Joe Danger (2010)) to a seemingly major development in gaming design and development. On its release No Man’s Sky was widely praised for its innovative use of procedural programming. This initial positivity quickly turned to recriminations with claims and counter claims about actual gameplay versus advertised gameplay taking up space in online blogs and chat.5 Since 2016 No Man’s Sky has also changed in terms of its design and software with the release of numerous patches and a continuing series of updates from Foundation (1.10) to Interceptor (4.23) (in April 2023) that have led to material transformations of the game. These too can be seen as a part of an ongoing process of renegotiation with the gaming community. The pre-production alliances briefly outlined earlier show shifting interrelations between game genre, developer communities, game journalism, gamer culture, game design and its coding, as well as more besides. In their different ways these relations configure the game beyond the simple tag of a procedural game based on exploration and survival. Of such shifting interrelations Jane Bennett uses the phrase temporary working assemblages to describe systems enacting real change or transformations in an object: And they form noisy systems or temporary working assemblages that are, as much as any individuated thing, loci of effectivity and allure. These (sometimes stubborn and voracious but never closed or sovereign) systems enact real change. They give rise to new configurations, individuations, patterns of affection. (2015: 233)

The alliances already briefly noted show different degrees of attraction for marketing, celebration, as well as vitriol, each of which enact change on the game as shifting configurations with positive and negative associations emerge. As these temporary alliances shift and then shift again the game is neither closed nor sovereign but remains alive to change.

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When talking about multiple influences it is easy to gain an impression that anything and everything is possible, that each potential influence operates from a level playing field, but that is not the case. In No Man’s Sky’s assemblage the flow of connections is fraught, caught up in many competing influences. For instance, the many negative reactions to the playability of the game at first overcame the positive responses to PCG. This has gradually changed as the patches and updates have increased opportunities for players to engage with the game. What becomes evident from these competing influences is that limits and constraints always operate in the formation of material-discursive configurations. Karen Barad’s work is helpful in illuminating this further. An important dimension in Barad’s work is her attention to the ways the entanglements of ideas and objects sediment or how they become stabilized via of process of iterations promoting inclusion and exclusion. Her interest in the creation of boundaries is especially useful. Barad’s work was originally both a theoretical explanation of entanglement, agency and relationality and also an examination of specific entanglements in the history of quantum physics. Since Meeting the Universe Halfway was published in 2007 numerous scholars have brought Barad’s approach to bear on disciplines as diverse as media, theatre and economics (Parikka 2010; Salter 2010, and Carlile et al. 2013). When taking a relational view of software and algorithms Barad’s ideas strike me as having real purchase. In keeping with many materialist perspectives, relationality and entanglement for Barad are dynamic. Especially important is her position that entanglement is a material and discursive process, something clear in the assemblage of No Man’s Sky. PCG is a computational process whose digital materiality is based on a capacity for great variation in its transformations. By digital materiality I mean the code of PCG and its execution as a computational action generating particular outcomes, such as patterns of noise for a terrain or combinations and permutations of patterns underpinning tree and planet shapes. Through its capacity for generating patterns PCG’s potential for generating terrain is very open even though only some of the possible patterns are followed through. In the case of No Man’s Sky procedurally generating diverse terrain is central to the quintillion planet game, with the many potential terrains filtered through the evolving purpose of the design team. That evolving purpose included ideas about what made a terrain interesting to explore and also the look or colour palette of a planet’s environment. The particular value of bringing Barad into my discussion is her concept of boundaries. Boundaries are really helpful for getting to grips with what is at stake, for exposing which

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social, cultural and technological influences are playing out at the moments when transformative potentialities begin to converge and congeal into one kind of outcome even as others are excluded. Talking about boundary formation in relation to the procedural techniques of No Man’s Sky and Everything is a way into exploring production disclosures and what they reveal about digital scales.

No Man’s Sky and its emergent boundary conditions The boundary formation that especially interests me for No Man’s Sky is the one which keeps the configuration of procedurality at a human rather than a digital scale. Such a configuration erases thinking about and engaging with the difference digital processes can make to an experience of time and space. In many ways No Man’s Sky’s emphasis on human-scaled action mediated through an avatar typifies the situation of many games. As described earlier, avatars are one avenue of engagement for players and in the case of No Man’s Sky primarily creates an understanding of procedurality through the tasks associated with the game mechanic. These tasks are key to orienting players within the scale of the game. Alongside the orientation created by the avatar, production disclosures associated with No Man’s Sky offer further insights into the ways in which an awareness of digital scales and their mediations are displaced in favour of a more familiar configuration of scale based on human experience. I am not suggesting that a range of individuals deliberately seek to set digital perspectives aside. Instead, I point to the ways in which the material-cultural narratives of No Man’s Sky’s production converge in ways that generate boundaries between human and digital scales. When a boundary emerges the wide array of potential options available during the production of and playing of a game begin to narrow down since some options are privileged over others. As the array of potentialities is narrowed down, when particular options are normalized through repetition, our capacity to see things otherwise becomes constrained. The boundary in No Man’s Sky is formed in two ways. First, by player orientation in the time and space of the game which occurs through their engagement with the avatar and game mechanics. And second, by boundary sedimentations which begin before a player gets anywhere near the game. Such sedimentations are evident in the design decisions which influence the relational possibilities arising between software and designers and also in the discourse surrounding the production of No Man’s Sky.

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Boundary formation is in the end a matter of reconfiguring possibilities. Relationality (intra-actions in Barad’s terminology) involves iterative and dynamic reconfigurations of what is possible and what is not. In the general context of a game assemblage some of these processes are computational, some are the working through of design choices and some are informed by the social and cultural experiences of an individual player and the wider context and assemblage of the game. A challenge is to ‘contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering’ (Barad 2007: 235). Accordingly, the materialcultural narrative of No Man’s Sky can be interrogated for what it reveals about the ways digital scales are reconfigured to human ones. Take, for example, the sometimes double-handed discussion of procedural generation techniques. This is evident when celebrations of the opportunities available to game design through automation are placed alongside processes found in the natural world. Here the digital scale of computation is linked back to human experience. For instance, earlier I noted Tanya Short’s comments on Dwarf Fortress in which she parallels procedurality with evolution, repeated here to show this association: ‘Each component has its own rules and obeys everything else’s rules, but by layering almost infinitely, complexity derives from their interactions – which is rather like our own universe. Less vision, more evolution (quoted in Game Developers’ 2018). Mark J. P. Wolf similarly defines procedural processes through a doubled mapping of automated and natural processes: As fractal mathematics and the study of cellular automata has demonstrated, simple rules and concepts can generate complex structures, like a seed growing into a tree, or strands of DNA guiding the development of the human body. Video game worlds grown by algorithms are increasing in their complexity, and just as players explore these worlds, their designers are exploring the nature of worlds and their representations. While they will never reach the elegance and ingenuity of the procedural processes found in the natural world, their striving to imitate them can make us appreciate the universe around us in its combined simplicity and complexity. (2017: 294)

Both Short’s and Wolf ’s comments pull in two directions. The first is towards algorithms and computation while the second is towards the world experienced from a human perspective. The same double-handed tendency is visible in the numerous disclosures about PCG and its contribution to the making of No Man’s Sky.

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In the many interviews he gave in the run up to No Man’s Sky release in 2016 Sean Murray frequently described the game as both procedural and vast, characterizing it as an ‘infinite procedural sci-fi-space-survival-sandbox’ (2016). During these interviews Murray was often seen playing the game (for instance, on Spike TV, IGN, E3 (2015), VGX Awards (2016) and The Late Show) giving viewers a glimpse of the environments they might encounter as a player when they hopped from planet to planet. The diversity of planetary environments has always been one of the key selling points of the game, leaving the designers with the task of creating a PCG system primed to generate terrains to populate the 18.4 quintillion planets of the universe. When a player activates a new game of No Man’s Sky the formulae defining the game are always deterministically generated from the same seed number. These formulae generate data about planets and locations within a solar system. Innes McKendrick, one of the core team involved in designing the game at Hello Games, described the process as a top-down generation. They characterized the process as a kind of cascade in which data is input to a generator and the output data is then fed into another generator which is then fed into a further generator (2017). Specifically, the seed data is input into the solar system generator which outputs solar system data. This includes positional data in relation to the sun which in turn gives details about the atmosphere of the planet. The solar system data is input into a planet generator which outputs planet data about the kind of terrain it would have such as rocks, cliffs, mountains and oceans. That data in turn is then fed through to the terrain generator which outputs voxel data. Creating voxel data is crucial for enabling the 3D patterns that resemble caves, overhanging rock faces, as well as the peaks and troughs of an undulating landscape. As McKendrick describes, the terrain generator co-exists with texture and model generators (for flora and fauna) and so this last stage creates what is seen on the screen and then interacted with by a player (2017). Of the model generators for the flora and fauna Danny Oakes’ of SpeedTree states: Each planet is procedurally created and populated, down to the sounds created by the animals, making every player’s experience wholly unique. When it came to creating the huge variety of plants, the artists at Hello Games turned to SpeedTree to generate the huge varieties of plant life. . . . SpeedTree uses a combination of art direction and procedural tools to allow rapid iterations on any type of foliage, making it easy to generate hundreds of unique variations while fine tuning the result by hand. This allows small teams to create immense game worlds filled with vegetation. (2016)

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Oakes’ remarks, written as a blog to market SpeedTree software on the company’s website, draw attention to the scale of diversity required for a vast universe consisting of multiple planets. The variations of flora and fauna necessary to keep the different planetary environments interesting for players indicate how a range of procedural processes are central to crafting a detailed game. The top-down system for generating the planetary systems and subsequently the details of each landscape is central to the efficiency of the computer processing behind No Man’s Sky’s planetary generation and commentaries often revel in the economy of the game’s design. As Raffi Khatchadourian wrote in the New Yorker: The design allows for extraordinary economy in computer processing: the terrain for eighteen quintillion unique planets flows out of only fourteen hundred lines of code. Because all the necessary visual information in the game is described by formulas, nothing needs to be rendered graphically until a player encounters it. (2015)

This economy in processing associated with playing No Man’s Sky is a consequence of the game’s digital status and emphasizes the computational processes by which it is supported. Though the visual details of any point in the game are encoded they only appear when they are required and disappear when they are not. What we as players see on our screens emerges from what actions we decide to take on a moment-to-moment basis. As Murray puts it: When you’re standing here, what you see around you is generated around you. If you fly away, it’s thrown away. If you fly back it’s generated again. Everything will always be the same, though. It’s a formula where the input is where you stand and the output is what you see. Since the input is the same, the output is the same. (quoted in Takahashi 2015)

Such a description privileges the computational status of No Man’s Sky: what you see is generated around you in real time. It also begins to suggest how players and the gaming system of No Man’s Sky are entangled. Based on the formulae of the game, any planetary location has the potential to exist but only those which meet emerging needs based on the evolving actions of the player appear on the screen. Further emphasizing the mathematics underpinning PCG, Khatchadourian outlines how Murray talked about one simple equation that defined a limitless contour of hills and valleys with every point on the contour generated independently of every other. As Murray notes:

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‘This is a lovely thing,’ he said. ‘It means I don’t need to calculate anything before or after that point.’ In the same way, the game continuously identifies a player’s location, and then renders only what is visible. Turn away from a mountain, an antelope, a star system, and it will vanish just as quickly as it appeared. ‘You can get philosophical about it,’ Murray once said. ‘Does that planet exist before you visit it? Sort of not – until the maths create it.’ (quoted in Khatchadourian 2015)

As Murray’s comments again reveal, the game system operates by creating the orientation established by a player’s input via the avatar, which visually positions both player and avatar within the environment of any planet visited within the game. Murray’s point that the game only computes what is necessary to make a scene visually coherent is also part of the sedimentation of a boundary, when one set of decisions is taken forward and others are set aside. Such sedimentation is ongoing when playing No Man’s Sky. With the real-time operability of the game’s system providing forward momentum we focus on engaging with the mechanics of exploration and resource gathering. To give an example, when still in the tutorial mode of No Man’s Sky I approached the planet New Ninus and chose to land near the distress beacon I was prompted to visit. This meant the game system generated only the area visible to my avatar in that location. Knowing my inventories were close to full I opted to head directly to the beacon and deserted station and ignoring opportunities for resource gathering. Noticing a cave close by I headed a little way in. Again, the game system generated the interior of the cave once I entered it. My decision for going into the cave was to have more opportunities for taking stills as illustrations for a presentation I was due to give on the game. In fact, I recorded the landing sequence and my avatar’s quick run across the landscape for the presentation as well. But, my desire to seek out cool-looking images to illustrate my talk ultimately lead to my avatar’s death and loss of all its accumulated inventory. Ambling back from the cave towards the deserted space station my avatar got too close to some exotic glowing large green pods. As these burst open they spewed out both a dense cloud of toxic green gas and also hatched a nest of aggressive creatures. Having not yet honed my combat skills in No Man’s Sky my response was far from nimble. Consequently my avatar died and I felt quite miffed. Across this example of play my decisions and their evolution mesh with the game system and its rules. The system generates content only for where I go and what I see. The rules defining that environment such as the levels of aggression and distribution of its toxic pods sediment my actions.

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My avatar’s death sediments into a boundary which constrains the immediate decisions I can then pursue in the game. Such sedimentations are also present around decisions made during a game’s design. Returning to the top-down formation of planets in No Man’s Sky noted previously, planetary data is generated according to where a planet sits within a solar system. The position of a planet in a solar system and its relationship to the sun and other planets, determines the chemistry of the atmosphere, the mineral make-up of the planet’s surface as well as its weather conditions, and this in turn determines the flora and fauna. When asked about the colour palettes of the planets, designer Sean Murray linked this back to the chemistry data output from the solar system generator. As he put it: It’s not a lot of magic, just fairly simple chemistry. The angle of sun irradiation and its intensity determine what kind of minerals compose in the ground. Naturally different resources influence what kind of flora and fauna grows up in a certain area. Every leaf of every tree contains a variety of stains. In England or Germany, the chlorophyll is very dominant, that’s why most of our leaves are green. In other countries, they are more yellow, and the Japanese cherry blossom is reddish, so that’s easy. (quoted in Kratsch 2016)

By evoking the notion of simple chemistry Murray’s comments draw us towards a perception that No Man’s Sky’s solar systems and planets are based on a computational model of the physical universe. We might wrongly assume that the planets visited by players are a mathematical abstraction of the reality we inhabit. That seemingly straightforward connection is however modulated through colour schemes which echo covers of science fiction novels from the 1960s or 1970s: We want our style to look a little bit painterly. We want you to take a screenshot and have it look like the cover of a sci-fi book – something out of the ’60s or ‘70s – with the quite saturated colors. The way I picture all those old book covers, you have the desolate landscape, the lone explorer, his crashed ship, and a planet on the horizon. Crazy colors in the sky and on the ground, weird shapes of flora and fauna, but still reminiscent of Earth, still with a touch of how Earth looks. It’s almost like the style of Star Wars or Star Trek, their alien worlds. That’s what we’re going for. That’s sci-fi for us. You won’t come across planets that are photoreal, or that are the standard post apocalyptic wasteland you see in so many video games. (Murray quoted in Takahashi 2015)

Interestingly, closing down on a photoreal look generated fan culture activities as the diversity of planetary colour schemes appealed to fans of No Man’s Sky.

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Exchanging images of the planets has become one of the routes for sharing details about a player’s exploration. Screenshots of many planets can be seen on Reddit, Pinterest, Twitter feeds, Instagram and the No Man’s Sky wiki on Gameopedia and the Steam community, and these reveal the diversity of planetary ecosystems discovered by players. The extensive uploading of No Man’s Sky screenshots signals the appetite amongst gamers for sharing their experience of exploring the universe of the game. The comments by Murray about simple chemistry embedded in formula and a painterly style illustrate the ways in which the game designers and the potential of PCG evolve and converge. Opting for a painterly style sediments the exclusion a straightforwardly photoreal look. A consequence has been a burgeoning of fan-based sharing of images of the planets they have explored. Thus far I have looked at sedimentations in relation to play and examples of design decisions linked to the colour scheme of the planets. Production culture disclosures give insight into sedimentation as emergent from decisions between technologies and designers. Production disclosures also have a role in boundary-drawing practices. Boundary drawing occurs as materialdiscursive relations sediment into a specific configuration which then becomes privileged above others (Barad 2007: 139–40). The specific example of boundary formation I explore now is visible in the material-cultural narratives about terrain generation in No Man’s Sky. Terrain generation whether in visual effects, animations or games, often makes use of noise patterns which when layered and filtered in complex ways are described as looking like the contours of a landscape. The production disclosures around noise generation for No Man’s Sky both outline the algorithmic production of noise and also show how they are entangled with a process in which the digital scale of the game is scaled to human-like activities. The game offers a perspective on digital interventions wherein in digital landscapes are configured to be physical-like landscapes and made to human measure.

Noise and landscape Terrain generation literally creates the ground players inhabit through their avatar in the universe of No Man’s Sky. Generating the playable environment of No Man’s Sky is complex, not simply because of the inter-planetary scale of the game but also because the landscape and environments for each and every one

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of those planets need to be engaging and detailed. Across many interviews Sean Murray has described how he began working on what was to become No Man’s Sky. It was important for him to create a game giving players an experience of exploration and discovery. In order to meet the scale of his ambition Murray opted to use PCG. In a widely circulated story, which has become well established as a founding mythology for Hello Games’ production of the game, Murray describes himself as working alone on the project for a period as he tried out various PCG options from which to generate the numerous planets needed for such a game. As Sam White relates Murray’s story: ‘he focused his creativity on the sci-fi roots close to his heart, and which he had been channelling into a sideproject in his spare time’ (White 2016). Murray’s aim in this side-project was to find the most effective way for creating diverse worlds that would keep a player surprised and interested, letting them to play for hundreds of hours and still see something new. Creating such numerous and engaging worlds requires algorithmic terrain generation a process in which noise is exploited to achieve both variation and detail in terrains. These terrains would be walked through by player-led avatars and populated with plants and animals as well as drones. Using noise to create variation is a technique widely used by animators in the VFX, animation and games industry to add interest and organic-like (pseudo)randomness to a computer-generated texture. Perlin noise, one of the first commonly used noise algorithms in the VFX industry, was introduced by Ken Perlin in a paper called ‘An Image Synthesizer’, following his work on Tron (1982). Perlin developed the algorithm to solve the problem of generating naturalistic-looking textures. Computation tends towards lines with smoothness and constancy whereas textures found in nature often have patterning and flaws. The solution was to include random patterns in the computation of textures and Perlin noise, along with its successor Simplex noise, can be simply described as pseudo-randomly generated noise (Perlin 1985).6 Perlin noise remains in use today for creating what is known as fixed gradient noise. For instance, the procedural generated landscapes of Minecraft rely on Perlin noise algorithms (Fingas 2015). More often, as is the case with No Man’s Sky, Perlin noise is used in conjunction with an array of noise generation algorithms such as Simplex noise, cellular noise, fractal noise and Brownian noise. When used in combination these algorithms can be manipulated to create visual complexity in large-scale environments. Put simply, noise functions generate a wave-shaped curve with distance mapped against time. Changing the amplitude (a height function that creates

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peaks and troughs) and frequency (the number of peaks and troughs in a given distance) alters the profile of a line. Adding different-shaped waves together complicates the pattern such that different sizes and numbers of peaks and troughs can be superimposed on each other to create, say, a more jagged pattern. Generated in 3D noise functions create peaks, undulations, depth and shallows. Terrain design also utilizes different levels of noise (known as octaves), which allow designers to target varying degrees of granularity at specific areas of a contour. These enable modification of the fine details on different types of contours such as smoothing a shear and jaggedy high slope to suggest erosion, or adding patterns that look like outcrops on a shallow one. Since noise algorithms generate complex patterns with computational efficiency and at a vast scale they are used to cover over the smoothness of computation. Noise introduces pseudorandom qualities that are manipulated to approximate realworld phenomena. As Jouni Smed and Harri Hakonen describe: To depart from the ideal presentation we can add smooth non-repetitive variations to the generation process to make it look more organic. This is a kind of magic trick, because the underlying computation does not vanish but is masked to resemble real-world phenomena. One source for such variation are noise generators. (2017: 47)

Complex noise generation underpins the approach taken by Murray and the Hello Games team to terrain generation in No Man’s Sky. In a presentation at the Game Developer Conference in 2017 (GDC17), Murray explained how he used an array of noise generation algorithms, what he refers to as ‘uber noise’ to build the visual complexity and vast planetary scale he envisioned for the game (2017). Uber noise is a combination of many octaves or levels of noise created using combinations of noise functions including Perlin, Simplex, Billow, Ridges, Worley, Analytical Derivatives and Domain Warping. Each noise function generates distinct patterns and, when used in 3D, the visual similarity of these patterns to known geographic features makes them suited to terrain generation. Computationally, noise generation is pattern generation which when entangled with the needs of a design team is discursively configured as terrain and landscape. Billow, for instance, can create patterns that look like rolling hills. Ridges, as its name suggests, can generate sharp ridges and Analytic Derivatives can generate patterns equating to erosion. Working with uber noise Murray and the Hello Games team manipulated the algorithms to create patterns replicating the terrain for lakes and rivers, caves, overhangs, slope erosion, altitude erosion,

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ridges, plates, terraces, rolling hills, all the while minimizing the repetition of features. The team could also add detail by controlling noise features on different kinds of slopes, lower or higher, steep or shallow. Murray’s description of uber noise and his explicit mapping of noise onto geographic features transforms our comprehension of PCG, shifting it from a process of computational patternmaking to landscape generation. Noise algorithms are entangled in a mix of computational and cultural influences. Seen in this light, the operation of the algorithms is no longer a simple computational process but shaped and sculpted for our comprehension. An interesting side effect of the vastness of the No Man’s Sky is the digital ‘drone’, a fly-through camera that crosses terrains and enables the design team to check whether the multitudinous planets fit their established paradigm. As Raffi Khatchdourin describes: ‘Because small changes can have unpredictable effects – the colour of a single plant infecting every tree, rock, and animal on a planet – his [Grant Duncan’s] team uses an algorithmic “drone” that navigates the universe, taking snapshots to measure the repercussions of decisions’ (2015). Here again is an instance in which the vast computational scale of No Man’s Sky is configured in terms of something familiar: colour choice. As ideas about computation and pattern generation give way to an emphasis on human endeavour and terrain for exploration, a boundary begins to coalesce in the material-cultural narrative. When this happens the opportunity for engaging with the digital scale of these interventions becomes more limited. Of course an awareness of the digital scale of procedural generation continues, but the material-cultural narrative that surrounds it displaces attention to various human-like scales. These include expectations players might have of an exploration game. In his GDC17 talk Murray describes how their use of uber noise enabled him and his team to decide on ‘what makes something fun to play, what doesn’t, what controllability we want’ (2017). The controllability to which Murray refers is the data load and the capacity of the game engine to deliver a real-time experience as well as have control over the terrain and its details. The question of what makes something fun to play meant meeting the perceived expectations of players. Those already well versed in the exploration mechanics of open world games such as the Metroid series (1987–), EVE Online (2003–), Far Cry (2003–), Final Fantasy (2001–) and/or the smaller but visually intricate worlds of Mass Effect (2007–), Assassins Creed (2007–) or Red Dead Redemption (2010–), to name just a few examples, would bring their generic expectations to No Man’s Sky. Such games or game series set an expectation for playable environments that both looked appealing and also offered challenging

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activities. Each of these games had a clear purpose if not a fully laid out narrative trajectory. In Metroid Samus Aran protects the galaxy from space pirates, the original trilogy of Mass Effect pitted Commander Shepherd against the Reapers and in Far Cry, players had to find ways of surviving in the wilderness of the frontier. No Man’s Sky had to mesh with the expectations of players already familiar with these types of games. In addition to addressing the generic expectations of exploration and survival games, the high-profile marketing campaign for No Man’s Sky generated specific expectations about the multitude of planetary environments and the kinds of activities a player could anticipate. Outlining its possibilities the marketing materials shift away from the digital underpinnings of the procedurally generated games. Instead the human-like scale of things was emphasized via attention to the range of activities mediated through the game’s avatar. One of the striking things about No Man’s Sky is that aside from space travel, the activities of an avatar are grounded and quite ordinary. For instance, in the many trailers released at game exhibitions, in interviews, TV appearances and on blogs on the studio’s website, a detailing of the exploration and trading-based gameplay co-existed alongside the emphasis placed on the PCG underpinning the game. Leading up to the game’s eventual release in August 2016, Hello Games, first alone and then in partnership with Sony, orchestrated a publicity strategy which built anticipation of the game based on both its vast environment and playability. Prior to release examples of gameplay in No Man’s Sky could be found on PlayStation Access, Gamespot and IGN.7 With such an emphasis on the size of the game a number of people in the gaming community wondered what they would actually do in No Man’s Sky beyond resource gathering, trading and travelling. Answering this question in an interview with Dan Silver of Eurogamer Murray describes the studio’s desire to create an unpredictable game, one open to play in a vast multiplicity of ways. He promoted No Man’s Sky as essentially a survival game with journey elements, trading and combat elements. But, as Murray indicated, how gamers engage with those possibilities is entirely in their hands: ‘When people say, “What do you do? What’s it all about?” it’s because, I think, they want to know where the limits are. They’re like, “Okay, you do that . . . but what else do you do?” is how I take it’ (quoted in Silver 2015). Beyond the question of players engaging with the possibilities of the game in whatever way best suited them, activities available in No Man’s Sky were fully described in this interview, and the mechanics of trading, resource gathering and travelling through space, all establish activities on a human-like encounter with time and space.

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The human scale of No Man’s Sky is further accentuated when significant passages of time are experienced as part of play. Innes McKendrick explains how in order to give a sense of time an avatar needs to spend travelling the thinking behind the team’s planetary design included ensuring that significantly long travel distances existed in the game: We needed to simulate space where someone walking around a planet, if they wanted to walk around to the other side, that would feel like a really weighty and significant thing for them to do. We wanted our players to explore, and to feel alone, and that meant that those distances needed to be large. (2017)

The human-scale experience of playing No Man’s Sky is not only located in the mechanics of gathering and travelling. If a player chooses to fully explore the dimensions of the planet on which they are located its size necessitates that those explorations take time. All the activities, whether walking around a planet or exploring numerous planets trading all the way, are played through the orientations of an avatar whose human-like interactions tether players to the parameters of a human-like experience of time and space. I earlier noted quotations by Short and Wolf, which drew a parallel between procedurality and natural processes, and Murray echoes these when claiming the game is designed to encourage reflection on our place as humans in the universe: We can’t provide you with an endless stream of wonder, but if you just stand still for a minute to enjoy the scenery and think about the awesomeness of being the first one discovering this planet . . . I think that’s pretty magical, and something you don’t have in other games. I want you to get a sense of how tiny our planet actually is, and how much more is out there. (quoted in Kratsch 2016)

The idea of creating a sense that there is much more out there, when taken alongside the mechanics of the game, further configures No Man’s Sky’s universe in human-like terms. A significant part of this for No Man’s Sky is the time required to carry out activities. Even though a science fiction game, taking time remains a necessity for gathering, traversing a planet’s surface, or travelling across vast spaces (albeit in spacecraft with hyperdrive) and trading with other entities. These activities serve to solidify a boundary around human scale, and as this occurs the relational perspectives of the material-cultural narrative on PCG narrow as it is primarily encountered on a human-like scale. In this entanglement notions of computationally generated patterning give ground to the generation of the landscape and sediment into a boundary around which

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an understanding of digital scale is configured. In this configuration digital potentialities are reduced to offering a place for humans to play out a fantasy according to rules of human-based time and space. I return now to the figure of the avatar which is key to orienting players in the dimensions of a game world. In addition, avatars entangle players in the material-cultural narrative of a game’s assemblage. In No Man’s Sky the playercontrolled avatar’s encounters with the vast procedural space, landscaped through noise patterns configured as familiar geographic contours, occurs through a range of gameplay activities that moor players at the boundary of a human appreciation of scale. Even the negative press and commentaries solidify this boundary. When the game was released it was clear that Sony and Hello Games had not effectively managed the expectations of gamers with a virulent backlash quickly taking hold. Criticisms were levelled against repetitive gameplay, weak narrative, absence of online multiplayer activity and accusations that the game was tedious. For instance, for New Scientist, Douglas Heaven wrote an article entitled: ‘When Infinity Gets Boring: What Went Wrong with No Man’s Sky (2016)’, and for The Economist Tim Martin wrote: ‘When Infinity Gets Boring (2016).’ Some early bugs in the game, which had already caused postponed drop dates, also tested the patience of players. In the period since No Man’s Sky’s initial release there are have numerous patches and several significant upgrades: Foundation (1.10) (November 2016), the Path Finder Update (1.20) (March 2017), Atlas Rises (1.30) (August 2017), Next (1.50) (July 2018), and the introduction of the VR version Beyond (2.0) (July 2019). By 2023 recent releases included Interceptor (4.23). At the British Academy Game Awards in 2022 No Man’s Sky won the Best Evolving Game award, indicating that the game had overcome its problems (Heaton 2022). The updates have added a survival mode, a small-scale multiplayer option, a series of narrative options, more weapons and vehicles, base-building, space-fleet management and a VR option to increase immersion in the game’s environments. All of these additions have added to the configuration of No Man’s Sky as a vast exploration game. The ethos of exploration goes further as it has developed a life within the gaming community around No Man’s Sky, a facet actively encouraged by Hello Games in their treatment of the game as a place for collecting images. As noted earlier, players are encouraged to share images on major platforms, including Steam, Reddit and Instagram. The No Man’s Sky wiki on Gamepedia showcases unusual landscapes, flora and fauna as a kind of travelogue: ‘Every discovery you make is logged to the game servers and reported in those tooltips, so if anyone has been

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there before you, you’ll know’ (Welsh 2016). There was briefly a planet-naming app called No Man’s Sky Ally, developed by fans and available for Android and iOS devices. In addition, Hello Games continues to oversee a Galactic Atlas, which acts as a ‘showcase for anecdotes, fan lore and memories players have shared within the game, and celebrates the leading exporters for each featured location’.8 For Clayton Purdom, these fan-based activities are part of a wider cultural phenomenon of fans wanting more content. Writing about No Man’s Sky: Next he noted: Maybe we just want more culture: more podcasts, more Doom levels, more content, more everything. That certainly was the case with No Man’s Sky, which promised adventure at a dazzling, galactic scale and delivered instead a game in which you literally spend most of your time mining for minerals. Despite its awe-inspiring, New Yorker-baiting scope, it became quickly enshrined as a mere podcast game, the sort of thing you while away a few hours before bed to, preferably high. The players that stuck around throughout the game’s updates have worked through this grind, creating sprawling narratives among themselves, with a galactic federation and a police force, a special calendar, colonizing minuscule corners and fighting for turf within it. Its building tools have inspired some Minecraft-style inventions, like an enormous working pachinko machine. (Purdom 2018)

Purdom’s comments show up the diverse ways in which fans inhabit the opportunities offered by playing No Man’s Sky, and which through their emphasis on exploration and sharing images of planets reiterate the human scale of the material-cultural narrative of the game. This is added to further by modding and archeogaming, the study of created culture in video games (Flick, Dennis and Reinhard 2017).9 In his remarks Purdom also tags No Man’s Sky play as colonizing, a position drawn out more fully by game community bloggers, critics and games scholars too. Within games studies commentaries on postcolonialism, colonialism and neoliberalism interrogate the cultural politics of games and in doing so focus attention on what a player is able to do in the game (Soraya Murray 2018). In their study of avatars in game design de Wildt et al. go further by arguing that the figure of an avatar is an example of cultural appropriation of Eastern culture into Western culture. This has come to encapsulate ‘an emerging communication nexus between humans, and humans and computers’ (2019). As a consequence, de Wildt et al. suggest the term avatar be opened up for further critical and reflective analysis. For instance, the narrative effect of exploring at a frontier and

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mining for resources connects games like Minecraft to debates about colonialism and imperialism already active in relation to games such as Civilisation (1991), Imperialism (1997), Empire: Total War (2009) and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (2018). These are one of the ways in which a game is entangled with politics and culture. As Daniel Dooghan explores the politics of Minecraft he acknowledges that while the game is fun this covers over the underpinning politics of the game: ‘Rather than showing the violent realities of neoliberalism, Minecraft promises a utopian space for players to experience labor and globalization in their idealized forms: Economic mythologies that justify exploitation and expansionism not as domination, but as development’ (2019: 68). As Dooghan’s remarks on Minecraft demonstrate, design decisions behind a game based on mining and trade become entangled with discursive concerns through the wider context of gaming, reviews and commentaries on the game (Simon 2016). Those critical of No Man’s Sky draw out this connection too. Emelin Miller, for instance, reflects on No Man’s Sky’s perceived or at least initial failure amongst significant numbers of players on the basis that it is not very interesting to play. Miller connects the tedium of play with that of daily colonial life: ‘No Man’s Sky captures that ennui of the daily life of the European colonial enterprise (2017).’ Similarly, in an argument that focuses on No Man’s Sky’s numerous drones Souvik Mukherjee connects No Man’s Sky with colonial discourse by suggesting that drones are remnants of a colonizing system: The player, however, is constantly surveilled by robotic cameras that some form of civilisation has placed in the planet. If they are remnants of another colonising system, it is possible to smash them and take on the mantle of coloniser oneself. The message is loud and clear: the resources are there for the taking. (2017: 12)

Connected by their focus on the avatar as the primary route for describing a game’s cultural and political resonances, these comments share a similar approach to No Man’s Sky. Their emphasis on mining configures our understanding of the game at the scale of human labour and operates through the boundary that emerged in the game’s production culture. When the emphasis shifts to matters of exploration and the extensiveness of the game world this configuration is reiterated. With the flexibility given by the introduction of intergalactic teleporters and numerous spaceships for travelling the scale of the game opens out further. Even so, this scaling remains centred on human-scale activities. Taken through this human-scale boundary condition set within the material-cultural narrative of its assemblage, No Man’s Sky is a vast universe for exploration, and players

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build communities and narratives about their place in the universe. When No Man’s Sky is critiqued for offering an experience whose perspective echoes colonialism, capitalism or neoliberalism, the boundary remains in place. I am not suggesting such critiques do not offer valuable insight as they do. Indeed, de Wildt et al. argue their insight into the fraught background of avatars has the potential to galvanize pre-existing concerns about power and representation that have be formulated in relation to the avatar by scholars working from critical perspectives informed by critical race studies, queer studies and feminism, and indicates a developing constellation of critical game studies scholarship that includes postcolonial theory to examine inclusivity in gaming cultures. (2019: 23)

My point instead is that there is scope too for scrutinizing what No Man’s Sky tells us about how we configure our experience of digital technologies. The analysis I have undertaken offers a re-thinking of our relations with games and their technologies. Rather than seeing the avatar of No Man’s Sky as a digital entity whose mechanics orient players in human-scale activities, we can explore it as part of a relational meshwork which operates within the assemblage of the game. When we pay attention to that relational network the avatar serves as a pivot in a process of boundary formation which knits together a series of material and cultural influences. When as players we drop into an environment depicted in the digitally generated imagery of a game world such as No Man’s Sky’s, we become entangled in a negotiation in which the digital scale of the production is reconfigured to human and physical scales. Something unfamiliar is made familiar and there is no reminder that digital dimensions of scale whose capacity goes beyond the parameters of human experience have the potential to destabilize our cultural trope of human autonomy. In itself there is nothing surprising in a game being played out on a human scale, as most indeed are. Even so, my purpose is to show that No Man’s Sky is emblematic of a negotiation in which the difference of digital technologies is subsumed under a familiar sense of human-like dimensions of time and space. It is a further example of human-centric thinking more generally when something that is non-human is reconfigured and transformed through an understanding based only on familiar, recognizable or human-oriented elements. Taking a relational perspective offers a way of combatting this short circuit in thinking about technologies.

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Conclusion Playing No Man’s Sky is a relational experience that expands beyond playing the game. It has a material-cultural narrative that shapes our understanding of many things including PCG, the focus of my discussion of the game’s production assemblage. Through their avatar a player travels and mines and engages with a wider process whereby digital spaces are renegotiated. In the case of uber noise, for instance, abstract computational pattern generation is repurposed as terrain. As terrain patterning converges with influences from other elements these impact on our relational experiences. These elements are both material and discursive and include the algorithms for noise functions, game mechanics, expectations based on the genre of exploration games and a production culture reinforcing ideas of a vast universe for travel and survival. Naming computational patterns as terrain, then, is part of a wider process in which a boundary is placed between human and digital scales. The process reveals not only how a boundary sediments but also how non-human scales become unseen. With noise discursively configured as landscape, complex noise as a facet of computation is unnamed and the different spatial and temporal possibilities of digital experience set aside. Nathan Ensmenger suggests that software is a system in which machines, people and processes are connected: Unlike hardware, which is almost by definition a tangible thing that can readily be isolated, identified, and evaluated, software is inextricably intertwined with the larger sociotechnical system of computing that includes machines (computers and their associated peripherals), people (users, designers, and developers), and processes (the corporate payroll system, for example). In this sense, software is an ideal illustration of what the historians and sociologists of technology call a sociotechnical system: that is to say, a system in which machines, people, and processes are inextricably interconnected and interdependent. (2012: 8)

In my discussion of PCG in No Man’s Sky I have explored not only the way in which a specific software is part of a sociotechnical system to which Ensmenger refers but, how that system extends across the assemblage of a game. Not only is PCG intertwined with computation or the designers of the game, it is also part of an entanglement with players and the wider network of connections relaying within an assemblage. Approaching game software in this way enables a deeper discussion of the technology of gaming systems. Though we are getting more familiar with

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histories of game technologies through platform studies,10 less attention has been paid to what a system’s technologies might contribute to the materialcultural narrative of a game. In terms of software a game system is of course complex and consists of many different connected software, much of which often does not feature in production disclosures. For No Man’s Sky PCG generally and noise generation more particularly feature extensively in the production materials. This has made them ideal as a case study for exploring how software is entangled and contributes to the material-cultural narrative of a game. Through the material-cultural narrative of No Man’s Sky attention to the difference of digital scales is increasingly deferred throughout the game’s assemblage. Instead, digital construction is encountered as something that reconstructs familiar conventions of human-scale time and space. The PCG of No Man’s Sky is colonized by a human scale of endeavour and exploration and the politics associated with those practices.

Notes 1 In No Man’s Sky: Next update the opportunity for playing online with up to three other players introduces another layer of interactivity and communication. 2 The term architecture is often equated with the structure of a program. Rollings and Morris suggest: ‘Architecture also encompasses the structures and flow of the data, and it defines the interactions between all the components of the system (2003).’ 3 By procedural generation during game play, I mean that No Man’s Sky’s game engine co-ordinates the view of the planet on the fly and based on the mathematics created from the PCG. 4 A skybox is a cube of six images that surround the game player and is used to create the illusion of a large and seamless world. It might include the horizon, sky or even the ground in the distance. 5 In an interview with Keza MacDonald in The Guardian, Sean Murray discussed the backlash he and the studio experienced following the initial release of the game (MacDonald 2018). Other commentaries include Kharpal (2016) and Kuchera (2016). 6 Algorithms are unable to create truly random numbers. Numbers generated algorithmically are always referred to as pseudorandom. 7 Links to these videos are on a No Man’s Sky website blog which also draws attention to No Man’s Sky appearing on major gaming magazines PC Gamer and Official

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PlayStation Magazine. Available online: https://www​.nomanssky​.com​/2016​/03​/no​ -mans​-sky​-official​-playstation​-magazine​-opm​-pc​-gamer​-cover/ 8 The Galactic atlas can be accessed online at: https://galacticatlas​.nomanssky​.com. 9 See for instance, https://archaeogaming​.com, which has a No Man’s Sky thread and also https://nomansskymods​.com where examples of modding can be found. 10 Platform studies emerges from a series of books whose aim is to investigate relationships between the hardware and software design of computing systems and the creative works produced on those systems. https://mitpress​.mit​.edu​/books​/ series​/platform​-studies

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What connects?

Everything is procedural game released around the same time as No Man’s Sky and its material-cultural narrative offers a counterpoint to that of No Man’s Sky. Many reviewers and commentators note players in Everything can be anything they want to be and that everything is connected. With such an emphasis on interconnectedness the question of connectivity is immediately relevant to Everything. Though central to my discussion of Moana connectivity has not explicitly featured in my approach to No Man’s Sky. As a system reliant on effective real-time computation, No Man’s Sky’s game engine ensures the PCG creates the correct view for its human-like avatar and the mechanics are fluidly responsive to input. In a game world where avatars gather and trade and as long as the game engine is managing the data load, connectivity is seamless and taken for granted. Everything is an interesting contrast. Though many reviews and commentaries focus on Everything’s apparent seamless connectivity, how the game connects remains an active question from which I develop a materialcultural narrative. Consider the following remarks by Chris Priestman whose review of Everything begins with a comparison to No Man’s Sky and goes on to explain how the games are very different: While this promise of being able to become anything does seem to be a oneupmanship of No Man’s Sky’s enormous procedurally generated universe, there’s a big divide in the two games’ roots. No Man’s Sky is largely a mathematical feat about conquering planets, plants, and creatures by discovering and recording them; it’s an imperialist’s wet dream. But Everything is almost the opposite of that. You don’t hold power over your findings by categorizing them, instead you enter their bodies, see through their eyes. ‘If you ever wanted to see what it’s like to be a horse, or a paperclip, or the sun, this is for you,’ O’Reilly says. ‘Your main power in the game is Being (there are more but I won’t ruin the surprise).’ (2016)

With its emphasis on how a player can become anything and see the game environment from many different perspectives Priestman’s comparison invokes relationality.

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Much of what is written about Everything speaks to relationality and the game environment’s connectivity. In many of these discussions the relationality of Everything is primarily with cultural influences including holism generally and Buddhist philosophy more specifically. Influences also accumulate around the expectations of players and how willing they are to step outside of game conventions when playing Everything. The latter will likely be shaped by a prior knowledge of OReilly’s animations and game design since OReilly has tended to break rules and conventions in his works. I introduce Everything through a discussion of these cultural influences and explore how they are mobilized as part of the narrative of Everything’s assemblage. To attend to the digital processes in the assemblage I take into account the material influences of procedural generation and the game engine Unity 3D. Both elements of Everything’s system set the parameters within which the game mechanic and the player influence one another. In other words, they influence how things connect. What interests me most is the extent to which the mechanics transform time and space in ways that go beyond human-scaled experiences. By exploring the production disclosures of David OReilly, the game mechanics and the commentaries of Everything I draw out a material-cultural narrative in which digital mediations of time and space mingle with ideas about connectivity. What ultimately connects is an experience based on datafication.

Introducing Everything Everything was released in March 2017. In the many reviews of the game two facets of its were often commented on: connectedness amongst all things and the ability of players to become all things. The Verge’s Megan Faroukhmanesh opens her view of Everything by saying: ‘I started the game as a brown cow, but quickly learned to be the new plants, animals, and objects around me’ (2017). Remarks of this kind echo and build on those of David OReilly. In an early marketing blogpost from March 2016 announcing Everything would release on PlayStation 4 (PS4), OReilly comments: The game lets you see the entire universe from the point of view of the thousands of things in it. In other words, there is no distinction between you and the world, or between a level and a character. All these things experience and interact with the world differently. Everything lets you be anything you want. If you ever wanted to see what it’s like to be a horse, or a paperclip, or the sun, this is for

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you. Your main power in the game is Being (there are more but I won’t ruin the surprise). (2016)

These remarks came a year before the game was released and do not aim to place the game within a genre. Instead they make clear players will be able to see the universe of the game world from many different perspectives. In a further PS4 blog to coincide with Everything’s release a year later, this time OReilly places the game as one of adventure and exploration while also making it explicit that everything connects: Aside from the core adventure, it’s also a giant sandbox – an interconnected universe which you can explore intuitively as well as design yourself. Just by playing the game you change its level design. Say you travel into a particular galaxy and you keep scaling down until you’re a single atom. You can travel all the way back up to the original galaxy – it all connects to itself. (2017a)

Everything is OReilly’s second game and followed on from Mountain (2014). Both were created in collaboration with programmer Damien di Fede, who wrote the code for the procedural generation elements of the games. The procedural element also underpins Eye of the Dream (2018), an immersive audio-visual experience that draws on some of the content of Everything. Procedurality is also central to the recent Quarantine Dreams (2020), a series of procedural animations OReilly produced during the coronavirus pandemic.1 In the latter OReilly used voicemails of people talking about their lockdown dreams as the sound track to the procedural animations. On its release in 2014 Mountain intrigued many. Described by OReilly as an ambient procedural mountain game, it is also known as an ‘idle game’ because play mostly involved watching the mountain evolve. As Justin Cone remarked: ‘Mountain upends expectations, refusing to fit into preexisting categories. As soon as the traditional tools of game criticism are applied to it, it deflects them like scalpels glancing off glass’ (2014). On initiating Mountain players are asked a series of questions about loss, illness, a first memory and encouraged to draw a picture of their response. Based on the answers provided by the players a mountain simulation begins. The mountain appears suspended in space with a small surrounding atmosphere and tapers off to a tail of rocks beneath its underside. The game consists of the mountain revolving in the background to other activities on a desktop. As it revolves the mountain passes through night and day and undergoes seasonal changes too. The mountain simulation evolves over fifty hours or so and includes growing trees, visits by various animals, accumulating

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random debris formed of everyday objects and the mountain sharing its gamegenerated thoughts with the player. Player interactions are limited: you can zoom in and out to capture the detail of what is going on at the mountain’s surface. Zooming into the surface allows players to scrutinize the various everyday objects embedded in the mountainside such as an airplane, padlock, dice, hats, baseball, a clock, or a tooth, all of which are scaled to be roughly the same size. The simulation ends when the mountain collides with a passing giant star in a final and catastrophic event. Mountain subverted expectations of both what a game could do and also what players might do. Following its release the game garnered mixed responses. Many critics applauded its conventionbreaking audacity while others were more dismissive and described the game as being akin to a screensaver. With players only given the capacity to watch and ponder Ian Bogost suggested Mountain proffered an invitation to speculate on what it’s like to be a non-human object in the world: Mountain breaks the mold of video games not by subverting its conventions through inactivity, but by offering an entirely different kind of roleplay action as its subject. It presents neither the role of the mountain, nor the role of you the player-as-master, nor the absence of either role. In their place, Mountain invites you to experience the chasm between your own subjectivity and the unfathomable experience of something else, something whose ‘experience’ is so unfamiliar as to be unimaginable. (2014)

Bogost sees in Mountain a version of object-oriented philosophy in which objects are granted an ontology not only beyond human experience but also outside of human perception and understanding, a perspective he explores in detail in Alien Phenomenology (2012). Everything inherits from Mountain in several ways. OReilly has stated he learnt to use Unity for Mountain and continued working with the software for Everything. As for Mountain di Fede again wrote the programming (Cone 2014). It also inherits OReilly’s stylistic sensibility evident in prior animations such as the game sequence in the film Her (2013), the Adventure Time episode ‘A Glitch is a Glitch’ (2013) and shorts such as Please Say Something (2008) and The External World (2010). In addition to challenging conventional content OReilly often pushes at stylistic boundaries. The aesthetic he challenges in his animations is that of 3D-computer animation. He uses the software Autodesk Maya, widely used in the animation and VFX industries. Rather than craft 3D-figures akin to those produced by Disney or Pixar, OReilly’s models are

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made in lower resolution and rendered in non-photorealistic block colours or flat shading. Figures in OReilly’s work tend to have dissonant and dislocated movements echoing the personalities of the often-irascible characters. OReilly’s challenge to conventional style and content run through from his animations to Mountain and into Everything. In Everything there is no explicit narrative and players figure out what they can do in the game by following through hints given in the game’s extended opening. The central mechanic allows a player to enter into the perspective and spatial scale of many (though not all) entities. These include objects, animals and vegetation populating an environment. Comprised of a series of procedurally generated scenes the game includes seven different levels each with its own scale. These are called particle, tiny, human, landmass, planet, galaxy and collapse, the name for an ‘inter-dimensional’ abstract environment. Within any of the scales between tiny and landmass there are six different environments: green forest, sand, ice, city, water and alien. These environments scale from the microscopic level of DNA and atoms such as Helium, Hydrogen and Boron, to the macroscopic dimensions of suns, star systems and galaxies. Between the two are planets (ice, ringed ice, alien, dwarf, green, ringed green and mesoplanet), continents (including land, sea and air), with the collapse dimension consisting of 1D, 2D and 3D shapes. In Everything a player encounters the game world through a range of entities and the game play and content proposes a logic in which all things are connected. Much of the marketing publicity around Everything and the subsequent reviews focus on the idea that everything is connected and that you can experience the world through the perspective of an ecology of things. For OReilly this is not just about seeing the world through different scales and via the perspectives of both foreground and background. It is also a way of comprehending the world of which we are a part. As he puts it: ‘Everything is a game about the things we see, their relationships, and their points of view. In this context, things are how we separate reality so we can understand it and talk about it with each other’ (OReilly 2017a). In this quotation OReilly proposes a key insight which is central to his narrative about Everything: he seeks to upend the way in we comprehend and make sense of the world of our experiences through the perspectives of all its different components. Interested in the writings of philosophers including Seneca, Epictetus, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Arthur Schopenhauer (all named in the credits) and also Alan Watts, OReilly approaches the world as an ecology. Instead of seeing the world as separable

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into subjects and objects, defining our connections in terms of us and them, he thinks in terms of the relationships between things. Speaking more explicitly about the philosophical dimensions of Everything, OReilly comments of the game that: ‘There are so many different angles to approach it from,’ he says. ‘From a general sort of game perspective, it’s a nature simulation, where every object in the game is a playable character and it’s like a narrated sandbox-experience-type-thing. There’s also this other aspect to it where it’s a very honest and philosophical dimension of the game, which is essentially how I see the world and about how it’s arranged and how it arranges itself and how we take different points of view on it.’ (quoted in Whalen 2017)

OReilly’s narrative about connectivity has been taken onboard in many observations about the game. But, even though everything within the game takes place in a procedurally generated universe where objects are created using an algorithm, technology and its place in those connections is frequently overlooked. As a corrective I expand the material-cultural narrative that surrounds technology and Everything. This narrative has its contradictions. Despite the claim that Everything offers players the perspective of each and every entity they encounter, such an emphasis on ‘being what you want to be’ paradoxically seems at first to maintain the security of human agency. The game mechanics encourage you to enter into the level of different entities that you can choose to do or not. If you take the option, you gather entities up and establish a growing catalogue of objects. Like a collector, players might tend to count their catalogue rather than engage with the process of how they went about collecting. A different perspective can be opened up by looking more carefully at the game mechanics. The very different scaling qualities make the presence of technology impossible to ignore. I am not suggesting that players and commentators are unaware of the influences of the game interface, but that the review narratives about the game habitually fall short of encouraging us to talk about digital things. We have already seen this played out in the material-cultural narrative of No Man’s Sky where the rescaling of digital processes to human-like dimensions forms a boundary-making process where digital influences remain opaque. What is different about the material-cultural narrative of Everything is that the boundary between digital and human scales remain fluid since both scales remain in sight should you care to look.

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Connectivity is the game When starting to think about connectivity in Everything how we play the game is a good place to begin. Within each level, say the ground level of a specific location, a player’s main activity is to either enter into the different entities they encounter or stay as a particular one and roam the space. You can resize by becoming larger or smaller. In the form of any available entity, a player moves through the environment encountering other objects. You can either enter the new object, join with them, replicate yourself into larger groups of entities, as well as sing and dance in triangular patters. Essentially, how you move through the space is up to you. As Laura Parker notes in her review of Everything for California Sunday: There are no clear objectives, no rewards, no sense of progression. The only purpose, if it can be characterized as such, is to interact with and inhabit any object on the screen. In other words, anything you see, you can be. A rock. A cedar. A sun. How long you explore the game as any given object is entirely your choice. (2017)

When scaling up or down within an environment players can transport themselves through microscopic dimensions as well as its larger-scale ones. For example, I moved from the planetary level of galaxies into a green planet, down to the surface of the ocean as a cruiser, before becoming a city landmass and then moving around as a car, truck and bus. I then entered into a trash can, scaling down to be a no. 8 billiard ball, a grain of pollen, a helium atom, before entering into the collapsed level as a feed-back sphere. Each entry into a new object is logged generating an individual catalogue of known objects for each player. Once far enough into the game you can swap from one entity to another in your catalogue regardless of whether it matches the scale of the environment, swapping out, say, a dust mite for a VHS tape or a galaxy for a whale. As well changing entities this mechanic allows you to change the makeup of the game’s environment by adding a pod of dolphins or a group of koala bears to outer space, a cloud or unicorn to an underwater environment. While adding a degree of whimsy to the experience of playing Everything, the mechanic has interesting consequences since it leaves traces of the player’s presence in an environment. Progress in the game is both a growing catalogue of things and also an amassing of left-behind entities that remain roughly in the area you were on entering the level of another entity. The data defining this trace is retained within the game

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and your digital footprint is procedurally re-produced should you return to the area. In an echo of Mountain the spaces you visit start to fill with random detritus. In amongst the grass or paving stones you can discover floppy discs, scissors, candles, nail clippers, glasses, coins, cameras and binoculars. Each of these you can connect with and add to your catalogue of objects. Because of this accumulating detritus, through play, you begin to realize that things are connected beyond the fact of being able to seamlessly progress up or down all the different levels of the game. Your path through the game leaves traces of data that shape the environment of the game and so how you play (Figure 4.1). Connectivity exceeds the power to enter into everything and see from different perspectives. It accumulates through a growing sense that the more you play the more your decisions have ecological consequences which are visible in the everexpanding array of entities accumulating across all levels of the game: fleas, for instance, come to inhabit space on the tail of my progression through levels. This accumulation of objects can be taken as a literal evocation of the ecological consequences of how humans inhabit their environments: we leave stuff behind in ways that can damage and change that environment. But there is a second layer here too since the accumulation of objects is based on an accumulation of data traces. Our data ecology is becoming cluttered too. Connectivity as a theme or an underpinning ethos of Everything is reiterated in the audio dimensions of the game but this again draws away from questions to do with technology. As you move an object through its environment thoughts

Figure 4.1  Image from Everything showing the accumulation of objects such as dice, skittles and plants within the galaxy level of the game. This accumulation is a trace of the data left by a player in the game. Courtesy of David OReilly.

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appear, visibly and audibly bubbling up on your horizon as you travel through a level. You can interact or not. The thoughts written by OReilly are at turns wistful, melancholic or joyous, though also sometimes jibberish, often ask questions about existence: variations on who am I and why am I here? And this question does not speak solely to the experiences of humans since a player is addressed from the perspective of the multiple entities inhabiting the screen. If you do interact with these thoughts you are encouraged to contemplate the existence of entities on the screen and by extension your own relational place in the ecology of a universe. Players also encounter snippets of Alan Watts’ lectures on Buddhist philosophy. Watts, a British-American philosopher who lived in the United States (died 1973), is credited with popularizing Eastern philosophy to a Western audience. He offered a perspective on inner wholeness based on an appreciation that relations exist between everything in the world. The snippets from Watts’ lectures give players insight into his thinking and how he challenged Western notions of an alienated self by arguing for a more holistic conception of being in which all entities in the world are interconnected, co-reliant and compatible. Audio snippets from Watts’ lectures include: ‘There are no such things as things, that is to say, separate things’ (Watts 1965), or ‘As soon as you see . . . space is connective, you can understand that you are not just to be exclusively defined’ (Watts 1969). Just as occurs with the thought bubbles, you can interact or not with the snippets of Watts’ lectures as they appear as visual prompts in the environment you are passing through. For OReilly one of the facets of Everything is giving players access to philosophical ideas.2 As he says: ‘I hope when playing this you’ll find that philosophy isn’t something trapped in books, but something you can experience directly, without using anything but your own imagination’ (OReilly 2017a). For OReilly, Watts is the narrator of Everything, and in that role further underlines ideas of connection as unity: OReilly explains that he viewed the game as a ‘playable nature documentary’ and he figured every nature doc deserves a David Attenborough-esque narrator. But Watts’ philosophy also speaks to some of the game’s deeper ideas of unity in both the self and the Universe. Watts’ soundbites, combined with the game’s ambient soundtrack, create a true sense of wonder for the player. (quoted Roazen 2017)

The sound design adds to a player’s experience of Everything. In addition to the lecture snippets and thought bubbles the game is scored by Ben Lukas Boysen with a soundscape by Eduardo Ortiz Frau. The sound is not action-oriented but tied into the more meditative experiences of the game:

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Everything doesn’t play music based on what you’re doing specifically, it’s playing music based on the environments you’re in and the scale you’re in. But the way it’s used is not necessarily to go along with a certain emotional thread the same way one would in film, but it’s actually used to give the experience a kind of dignity and expressing something fundamental about nature. Something about the scale and ecosystem you’re in. (OReilly quoted in Roazen 2017)

The sound design and music are central to Mark J. P. Wolf description of Everything as a contemplative game. That is, one whose audio-visual design and relative calm in terms of activities promotes ‘a thoughtful, quiet, careful approach to life that could easily be applied to areas of one’s life outside the game’ (Wolf 2018: 2). For Wolf the design of the game encourages players to consider the connectedness of the universe: Another contemplative game set in an expansive world is David OReilly’s Everything (2017), which was designed to encourage the player to consider the connectedness of the universe. Players can ‘become’ anything in the game, from plants and animals roaming the wilderness, down to bugs and even microbes at the microscopic end of the scale, as well as landmasses, planets, stars and galaxies at the macroscopic end of the scale. (Wolf 2018: 3)

Between the statements made by designer David OReilly, the reviews, the game’s mechanics and its audio-visual environment, connectivity is explicit Everything’s assemblage. For many commentators the presence of thoughts and snippets from Watts’ lectures add a philosophical dimension to the game. Kaya York, for instance, argues: ‘Everything . . . is a manifestation or concrete representation of the abstract philosophical perspective called ‘monism’, the idea that everything is one’ (2017: 50). Watts’ inclusion in particular promotes the ideas of connectivity and a universe of entities reliant on each other. Commenting on the ways games and game engines can contribute to our understandings of interconnected networks, Michel Erler suggests that a player’s comprehension of the interconnectedness of the world leaves them with a sense of wonder: ‘OReilly has stated that the aim is to leave players with a feeling of wonder. Watts calls this a point of emotional investment, in which one realizes the tremendous interconnectedness of the world’ (2019). Simon Parkin says: ‘Everything’s simple yet revelatory trick is to show how all things are connected, through space and time, through that fundamental power of all video games: the capacity to inhabit the form of another’ (2017). Yet, it is clear that what you become in Everything is an entity in a game universe whose

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Figure 4.2  Image from Everything showing a deer entity in different head-over-heel orientations. Courtesy of David OReilly.

ability to inhabit space is quite distinct from any entity in physical reality. Even though it remains unacknowledged by many commentators there is no pretence at equivalence in Everything. When starting to play the game for the first-time players begin in the form of an animal entity selected by the system. I started playing in the shape of a bear. You can ‘be’ the creature only insofar as you can cause it to move via inputs. Initially, the movements of the digital bear seemed odd and estranging. One of the features of Everything is the odd roll-over from head to tail motion of many of the land-based creatures (Figure 4.2). The models were designed by OReilly using a low-resolution aesthetic and do not have articulated limbs. To keep the computation load low the movements of quadrupeds including bears, cows, pigs, rabbits, foxes or unicorns, involve the same simplified head-over-heels roll. Other entities such as trees and flowers glide across the surface terrain as do the water-based fish and mammals. Objects including Rubik’s cubes, scissors or cassette tapes, flip-flop end over end. In this way Everything gives players the experience of an unusual movement through the terrain. OReilly picks up on this point himself when providing an explanation of what Everything is about: I think on the highest level it’s about describing what nature is doing, and every idea follows behind that. The results of that can lead to abstract looking things, that you might call ‘unnatural’, but only in some visual specifics  –  the underlying logic and systems are all attempting to describe the common ground of life itself (@30000fps. 2017)

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OReilly’s explanation gives further insight into the logic of Everything and his use of the term abstract introduces an interesting shift. In Everything it is not only creature movements that might be described as ‘unnatural’. All things in Everything veer away from a realistic look as landscapes, oceans, cityscapes and galaxies are modelled as stylized low-resolution variants which are rendered non-photorealistically. There is a visual abstraction to Everything since the entities are crafted with idealized qualities as opposed to being concrete representations of objects in reality. Both Maureen Furniss and Paul Wells have given definitions of abstraction in relation to animation. Furniss mobilizes a distinction between an idealized version of something versus a particular version of that thing, stating: ‘abstraction describes the use of pure forms – a suggestion of a concept rather than an attempt to explicate it in real life terms’ (2008: 5). When considering the rhythm and movements of abstract animations Paul Wells relies on a similar distinction: ‘Abstract films are more concerned with rhythm and movement in their own right as opposed to the rhythm and movement of a particular character’ (1998: 43). Abstraction in these definitions is both a descriptor of a type of visual imagery and a conceptual process. The combination echoes OReilly’s comment that Everything is not only about abstract or unnaturallooking things but equally operates via an underlying logic: a description of what nature is doing. As it does so OReilly argues his game expands our idea of nature as a process, taking in not only flora and fauna but also human activity: The game is basically expanding our idea of nature. Most of us think of nature as trees and plants and things like that, but Everything expands this idea to encompass cities and all of human activity. The more we expand this idea of nature, the less confusing and chaotic the world becomes. You have processes and systems, and not random events. (2017b: 80)

It is interesting to look at OReilly’s comments in relation to how computer scientists Peter Denning and Craig Martell define abstraction. At first OReilly’s alignment of the game with natural processes seems a straightforward remapping of digital interventions to human scales by equating procedural systems with natural systems. But several competing associations in Everything’s assemblage stop this alignment altogether sticking and the boundary formation that cohered through different aspects of No Man’s Sky’s does not occur with Everything. Before coming onto discuss these competing associations in detail I want to first more fully consider Denning and Martell’s thoughts on abstraction.

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It offers a way of bridging the human-oriented scales of connectivity so often found in commentaries on Everything to the digital scales of connectivity which are my focus. Abstraction is a process whereby a set of operations applying to all cases can be defined. As Denning and Martell put it: ‘Abstraction is one of the fundamental powers of the human brain. By bringing out the essence and suppressing detail, an abstraction offers a simple set of operations that apply to all cases’ (2015: 208). This definition makes explicit the conceptual processes underpinning abstraction and which aim for descriptions of an ideal as opposed to a concrete instance. It also makes clear that abstraction generates and works through establishing a set of operations or rules. In this sense Everything’s abstraction goes beyond its visual style and so OReilly’s remarks about processes and nature can be linked to abstraction and rule building. Talking about abstraction can also take us back to questions of computation and technology as abstraction and rule building are not only conceptual processes they are computational ones too. By recognizing that the connectedness of Everything’s universe is based on abstraction or a process of rule building it becomes more straightforward to unravel the kinds of connectivity and relationality the game plays out. The connectivity of Everything’s universe is not only about seeing from the perspective of many different entities and understanding that we all share the same ecology. Despite the many claims that you can be anything you want to be, Everything’s universe is beyond the points of view of entities encountered in the game’s universe. We do not literally see Everything’s universe from the perspective of a dust mite, a snowman, a pollen grain or a lenticular galaxy, and neither can we ‘be’ them in anyway other than see a world scaled through their relative size (and have access to thoughts in their environment). As a pollen grain you are surrounded by entities similarly microscopically sized, as a galaxy you are surrounded by entities similarly macroscopically sized. As you see similar scaling within any given level what connects is not straightforwardly a depicted world of concrete examples but abstractions which are an expression of the rules governing that world and these are computationally as well as culturally informed. Generally speaking in moving from concrete to ideal examples computational abstraction can be described as a process of filtering out, a setting aside of the characteristics of patterns not essential or relevant to the computational solution of a problem. The process of defining something through its essential characteristics often involves rule building that necessarily includes and excludes characteristics based on whether or not they are general rules. Rule

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building when applied more specifically to algorithms, whether complex or simple, necessitates a series of simplifications based on informed choices and assumptions about what is or is not an essential characteristic. Such choices and assumptions are where cultural, social and political influences have the potential to come into play in the coding of algorithms. A statement such as ‘the essence of abstractions is preserving information that is relevant in a given context, and forgetting information that is irrelevant in that context’ (Guttag 2013: 43), suggests that while rule-making is embedded in technological circumstances it remains aside from cultural ones. But, software studies scholars point out that coding is not neutral (Mackenzie 2006; Chun 2013). Similarly, the implementation of code is not neutral either as it happens via interactions with systems, people and objects. My aim here is not to drill down into the code for Everything. Instead, I consider the consequences of code execution visible in the game mechanics and what they tell us about how digital scales are encountered within the game.

Hybrid connections When asking what connects in Everything there is value in starting with claims that the game is a simulation of reality. Unlike the simulations of water made for the animated feature Moana, when it comes to Everything what is meant by reality is less about apparently realistic depictions and more about rules and systems. Asked about the movements of the entities in the game world OReilly notes: ‘Visual realism is not my highest priority and by having these procedural movement systems I’m able to draw attention to other things the game is describing’ (quoted in Creative Independent 2017). According to OReilly’s website, what the game describes is an interdependent system: Everything is a simulation of reality as a phenomenon of interdependent systems. There are thousands of things that perceive, think and interact differently while being driven by the same underlying rules. All things are aware of themselves, each other and their environment, and simulate with or without player interaction. (Everything – What is Everything? n.d)

A reality simulated as a phenomenon of interdependent systems stakes a claim neither towards photorealism nor human-lead perspectives. Instead, what connects is a hybrid set of connections that combine material (as

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in computational) and cultural influences. As we have already seen these interdependent systems conjure a philosophically informed relational world based on the myriad of objects populating the game world. And moment by moment how this interdependent system appears on the screen depends on a combination of player and game system inputs. The inputs include those of players as they interact with game world entities modelled by David OReilly as well as inputs generated by the Unity game engine. The latter co-ordinates numerous features of the game including the procedural generation system coded by Damien di Fede. Beyond seeing the visual difference of abstracted entities, how do players experience the hybridity of the simulated universe in Everything? A player’s engagement with Everything occurs through their interactions with the multiple entities on the screen. This array of avatar-like figures orient players in the spatial and temporal arrangements of the game world. The way players are oriented via the avatar-array of Everything reveals two facets of digitally manipulated time and space in the game. The spatial and temporal engagement with the universe of Everything is unlike that of No Man’s Sky where avatar movement is based on human-like parameters of space and time. By contrast in Everything transitions between on-screen entities are fluid and open to a player’s power to enter. As a player moves from entity to entity their experience of space is rescaled according to the scale of the entity. That rescaling is taken further when moving between levels of the game. Given the philosophical underpinnings of Everything this rescaling is often taken as an explanation of an ecological holistic connectivity and a commentary on relationality. Even so, the game can equally be seen as articulating an experience of ‘datafied’ time and space. The transitions a player experiences in Everything are scaled according to digital parameters and the difference of those parameters is evident in the game mechanics, its procedural evolution and the autoplay option of the game. Everything is a digital universe. Though variously described as a consciousness simulator, a nature simulator or an interconnected universe where you can be anything you want to be, the spatial and temporal transformations of Everything can be experienced as a universe of digital interventions. Describing the game David OReilly says: ‘There are so many different angles to approach it from,’ he says. ‘From a general sort of game perspective, it’s a nature simulation, where every object in the game is a playable character and it’s like a narrated sandbox-experience-type-thing. There’s also this other aspect to it where it’s a very honest and philosophical

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dimension of the game, which is essentially how I see the world and about how it’s arranged and how it arranges itself and how we take different points of view on it.’ (quoted in Whalen 2017)

Through this description OReilly makes explicit that he sees the world arranged in a specific way. Many commentaries on Everything are less interested in the game’s procedurality than they are about its status as a universe of connections. That very connectedness can be brought back to questions about digital interventions. Interviewing OReilly about Everything Andrew Whalen of Player One notes that while the game is about a connected universe its procedurality creates and enables different kinds of connections: And while Everything is first and foremost about holism, the idea that individual parts cannot exist independent of a collective whole, the immensity of its procedurally-generated environments soon spawn new and unexpected thoughts. ‘You can create worlds within worlds. When you’re in a microscopic scale you can turn into a planet and enter that planet. And let’s say you’re a whale on that planet you can turn into a planet and enter that planet,’ OReilly said, describing one of his favorite gameplay elements that’s not immediately evident to first-time players. And then you can pop back out, layer by layer, uncreating multiple worlds and realities. (2017)

This feature of the game’s playability, what OReilly terms creating a world within a world, adds a different scalar experience that brings attention to the interventions digital technologies make to spatio-temporal organizations. Indeed, this different scalar experience is not limited to the feature OReilly describes since it is central to the playability of all aspects of the game. As many commentators and OReilly describe, the central power of the game is the ability to enter any other entity or object and this power enables players to seamlessly move across levels and scales. The seamlessness of the movement leads to the impression of connectivity and in conjunction with Everything’s soundscape and underpinning philosophy, the entanglements of the material-cultural narrative of the game gravitate towards ideas about nature and holism. That narrative, however, never wholly settles to exclude the digital scale of the game’s hybrid universe. Instead, the connectivity of the universe in Everything operates in ways that draws insight into mediated and datafied experiences of the world. Connectivity relies not just on an awareness of relations between all the entities who inhabit the world but also on the technological elements that motivate and mobilize those connections.

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David OReilly cites the two short films Powers of Ten (Charles and Ray Eames, 1968 and 1977) as an influence on Everything (OReilly 2017c). In both versions of Powers of Ten the visual imagery moves through the relative scales of the universe by a factor of ten or on a logarithmic scale. Using a range of different image sources viewers are given a journey outward from two picnickers on a blanket on the ground to show the expansiveness of the universe, before then reversing back into an atomic scale via the body of a male human figure. The techniques used in creating the imagery include a short sequence of live-action, aerial photography, NASA-produced images of space, as well as electronic microscopy slides, photographs of drawings and painted images, all combined into an imagined version of this scaled universe. For Janet Harbord, Powers of Ten proposes a relational perspective in which human perception is decentred as the dominant way of seeing. As she argues: ‘Instead, it places the human body relationally on a scale of material forms, mapping various correspondences between the body and topography as matter in constant transformation rather than a representation of stable states’ (2012: 101). In many ways Everything is very distinct from Powers of Ten. It certainly shares the shifting dimensions of scale but it is a computer game created through one type of machinic system (digital techniques) rather than several, it is interactive and so affords types of engagement and experiences not available when viewing a film. Nevertheless, Harbord’s observations on Powers of Ten bring value to my discussion of Everything. Thinking through the relationships between bodies and matter she too is interested in scale: ‘Scale is not simply a question of power and hierarchy between things, but a matter of movement and rhythm that connects forms of animated matter across corporal and conceptual boundaries’ (Harbord 2012: 117). In Everything attention to relationality occurs via the game’s emphasis on a holistic view of the universe and the sense of a shared consciousness and connectivity. In this world view matter is literally animated across corporeal and conceptual boundaries through the mechanics of the game. This emphasis on crossing the boundaries between entities opens up the question of technologies’ role in the transformations of consciousness and connectivity. And through this we can see how Everything offers a negotiation with digital scale. Take one of the most often talked about facets of the game: the ability to enter into other entities in the scene and to move through different scales. Moving up and down scales is one of the key abilities of a player and this ability is a first step towards beginning to comprehend the different way scaling operates in the digital environment of Everything. In any location, providing there are

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entry points for moving up or down scale, I can transition from being pollen to mushroom to rabbit to tree to green planet to sun and to galaxy. Thinking beyond the trope of ‘being anything you want to be’, as a player you are no longer operating in a human-scaled space which supports the movements of a human-scaled avatars. Instead, it is a space in which engagement with avatar entities gives the player the power to both translocate and transform and to move from one place to another through a reconfiguration of spatial dimensions. In so doing the player’s scaled view changes and becomes that of the new entity they have entered. On a sand continent you can fly from the height of an eagle, walk from the perspective of a hyena or float with the point of view of a grain of sand. Transitioning from one entity to another, any sense of retaining an autonomous bodily integrity is dissembled, with engagement constantly shifting on moving from entity to entity. Furthermore, the temporal scale of the game can sift too. The larger an entity you become the faster time passes in an environment. You can enlarge your avatar and become a giant flipflopping rabbit or a massive gliding pyramid and time passes more quickly than if you were a smaller version of the same avatar.3 The rescaling of the game reveals a datafication of time and space where connection is reliant on digital interruption and reconfiguration. Interruption because human-like scales are disrupted and reconfiguration because as a new scale of connection is put into play the technology of what connects emerges. For OReilly scaling and also flocking (forming a group with similar types of animals, such as other bipeds) were both important features when developing the game, ones whose design took time to figure out: You have things within one area, but then they link to other scales. This was a huge design challenge that had to be figured out. And that’s in tandem with these systems where you’re a member of a flock, and where every object in the world is essentially a member of a group or a flock. So you can be one part of that, or you can be multiple parts of that. The scale and the flocking aspects were the two mechanics that took the most amount of design and that were there since the very beginning. (quoted in Wallace 2017)

Like scaling, flocking is a further example through which Everything’s digital scale emerges. Flocking changes the dynamics of interaction with a space. As a single entity you can increase your flock by either joining with other similar entities or by replicating yourself. The game includes ‘disaster’ scenarios, which occur when the frame rate falls below eighteen fps for more than six seconds.

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Usually this is due to computational overload because too many entities co-exist on the screen and the disaster scenario culls their numbers. Flocking is also a way in which you can alter the content of the game’s environment. I touched earlier on the ability of players to change the content of an environment by leaving an array of avatars in the wake of their transition to another entity or level. Though a player’s capacity to control the content of their environment is not obvious at first the ‘game is fundamentally changed by player input, meaning you can create and design levels as you’re inside them’ (Everything 2017). One example of changing the content to the game environment is self-replication, a mechanic which allows a player to shift from being a single caterpillar to become instead an army of caterpillars. This ability to replicate not only contributes to flocking as described earlier but also changes the content of the game’s environment. For instance, if still moving as an army of caterpillars, on entering a new object or animal the player returns to being a single entity only. The army of caterpillars that is left behind by this transformation may slowly dissipate but they do not disappear. Instead they remain present and now integral to the location. A player’s ability to control the content of the game is especially obvious when you use the option to swap between items in your inventory at any point in the game. OReilly describes this opportunity to introduce nested worlds into the universe: You can create worlds within worlds. When you’re in a microscopic scale you can turn into a planet and enter that planet. And let’s say you’re a whale on that planet you can turn into a planet and enter that planet. (Everything n.d.)

When playing in this way you can introduce nested scales within any level. On returning to your starting positions those nested levels remain in the game’s environment. As a player swapping between entities gives you power to control the content of the game, adding to it by swapping out amongst the options available to you. When using the nested option, the space of the game become elastic as you can fill space through self-replication, swapping between entities and so populating levels with all kinds of objects. Two aspects of the habitation of a digital world become visible through flocking and world creation processes. First, flocking and world creation make evident the ways in which our engagement with digital environments leave data traces behind. This is already obvious in a number of real-world situations such as forensic tracing of digital footprints or the ways in which social media sites harvest data which can be exploited by third parties. Seeing the over-accumulation of objects in Everything draws our attention to the proliferating debris in our

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physical ecosystems and the impact we have on our digital ecosystems. Because we cannot see our digital traces there is a tendency to forget they are there. But as data harvesting from websites increasingly shows our digital habits are not only easily traced but also exploited. Second, flocking not only increases the number of linked entities as it is another way in which you lose your individual status. Once a flock your point of control no longer obviously lies with an individual avatar since you control the flock as a whole. How the entities of the flock are connected is defined by the game and how it manages the data configuring the flock. OReilly offers the view: If you see a flock of birds, it has a behaviour, it’s doing certain things, but there’s absolutely no leader to it. . . . The whole game itself is about describing a state of reality with no Us and no Them. No We. Just I. For infinity. Everywhere. (quoted in Brewster 2017b)

In disrupting the conventions and opportunities for engagement via an avatar, Everything enacts a digitally mediated relational experience in which there is no simple positioning of us or them as either subjects or objects. As a player we find ourselves always in some way entangled within the process of connecting. Central to connections in Everything are procedural generation processes: ‘Everything takes place in a procedurally generated universe, where objects are created using an algorithm’ (OReilly quoted in DesignBoom 2017). Procedural systems generate the details necessary for jumping between levels and these underpin which scalar transitions can occur. Alex Wiltshire describes the process whereby the game analyses a player’s location and makes decisions about which entities are available as entry points: So the game analyses what is around you in the world and at the next scale up or down, looking at all the characters that are present and filtering them according to the parameters Di Fede and O’Reilly set, and then chooses one at random from what’s left. But as you make transitions into the next scale, it doesn’t simply spawn that character into the world for you to play as. Each one was originally carefully placed in the scenes by O’Reilly and they’re saved as you play. When you switch into controlling an armadillo, it really was there in the world, the game exchanging its AI for your control. (Wiltshire 2017)

As Wiltshire describes the switch from one character to the next he notes how Everything does not rely on spawning a new entity but on an exchange of control or influence. There is a shift from the game’s control to the player’s control and this continues to move back and forth. There are two things of consequence

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here. There is again a relational engagement in which control is exchangeable, distributed across entities as opposed to owned by an individual entity. Control is shared across both all the different entities and between player and system. Second, control is mediated through the entanglements of the gaming system that modify temporal and spatial parameters. To think this latter point through further I return to Peter Denning and Craig Martell and their comments on abstraction. Comparing the explanatory abstraction of classical science and abstraction in computing, Denning and Martell add a further distinction: ‘Abstractions in classical science are mostly explanatory – they define fundamental laws and describe how things work. Abstractions in computing do more: not only do they define computational objects, they also perform actions’ (2015: 208). Seeing abstraction as the performance of actions is helpful as a way into thinking through players’ entanglements with the processes and systems of Everything. David OReilly, for instance, states: Everything is an interactive experience where everything you see is a thing you can be, from animals to planets to galaxies and beyond. Travel between outer and inner space, and explore a vast, interconnected universe of things without enforced goals, scores, or tasks to complete. Everything is a procedural, AI-driven simulation of the systems of nature, seen from the points of view of everything in the Universe. (Everything 2017)

Teasing these remarks out, OReilly draws together an association between systems in nature and systems in computation. On the one hand algorithms in the programming define the systems of connectivity already described in Everything – those referring to a holistic universe. And on the other when OReilly further describes Everything as procedural the abstraction of algorithmic explanations and actions more overtly comes into play. As an algorithmic entity the AI-driven simulation is an explanation of OReilly’s conceptualization of the rules of natural systems and these give players the experience of an abstraction in action. The interconnectedness of the world is not just about seeing from the perspective of different entities, it also offers an experience of digital transformations of the parameters of time and space. Consequently the interconnectedness of Everything is computational as well as conceptual and as players we are in turn entangled with a computational system and its rules. In the absence of the boundaries evident in the human-scaled logic so pervasive in No Man’s Sky, the material-cultural narrative of Everything connects the

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operability of time and space in its game world to digital interventions. Not only are the levels created algorithmically, when played as extensible spaces and temporalities they are also experienced through algorithmic actions. As Andrew Whalen describes the collapse or inter-dimensional level these interventions can be conceived of in terms of mathematical models: Everything has its own locus of unreality. Shrink small enough or grow big enough and you’ll hit a null space not macro or micro that bridges the galactic and the atomic. You fall into a world of concepts and become mysterious 1D, 2D and 3D things like Feedback Cubes, Convex Stellated Polyhedrons, Tetra Clouds and Irregular Nested Structures. It’s a zone of mirror and mathematics, where sensation is synaesthesia, music is light. (Whalen 2017)

In this zone of mathematics it becomes easier to see Everything as a piece of software that creates the possibilities for different states of being, with these states of being scaled differently to those of our own experience. The fluid time and space created by the mediations of digital processes is part of that different state of being. A player is entangled in the digital operations of this process in the sense that they do not entirely control the process and the process does not entirely control them either. What connects is a set of hybrid relationships in which human and technological agencies fold together. As these contribute to the material-cultural narrative of Everything’s assemblage a performative dimension emerges too: software connects. Alexander Lehner argues that Everything defamiliarizes the conventions of games and in doing so enforces a notion of interconnectivity: Consequently, Everything can be deemed as a defamiliarization of the concepts of environment, avatar, and non-player-character and their general function. The distinction between those elements (conventionally used in videogames to cater to the player) fades and enforces the notion of interconnectivity of everything. This subverts the perception of the environment as something subject to gameplay (and thus the player) and lets it actively take part in it. In Everything, everything becomes the avatar and the player that the world is built around. (2018)

While broadly agreeing with Lehner and his idea that Everything defamiliarizes a player’s sense of environment because a player’s actions changes the environment, my emphasis is different. As a player engages with the array of avatars available in Everything and the game reconfigures around them, the different operability of space and time brings insight into the digital systems behind the interconnectivity of everything.

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Unity and autoplay in action So far I have talked about procedural generation and Everything. I look now at Unity 3D the game engine used by OReilly for both Mountain and Everything. Writing about games and game engines, Michel Erler suggests that: [A] look at how artists and designers appropriate game engines in novel ways shows that games and simulations can indeed be used to demystify AI. Rather than using simulations to narrow paths down, they reappropriate them to open up new paths and reveal the mechanics of their simulations and games. (2019)

Unity 3D and its contributions to Everything’s development opens up the game’s material-cultural narrative giving further insight into the digital mediations of Everything. Having already worked with Unity 3D when creating Mountain OReilly continued to use the game engine for Everything. Unity 3D is an off-the-shelf game engine available since 2005 when it gained traction in the relatively modest guise of a game engine for iPhones. Following its successful introduction for iPhones the applicability of Unity 3D has been extended across all game systems and the game engine became widely marketed to transport industry, animators and filmmakers, as well as architects and engineers. Samuel Axon writing about the impact of Unity 3D on the games industry on the tenth anniversary of its release has noted how widespread the game engine had become by 2016: But while Unity grew with the iPhone, today, games made with it are popular on all platforms. According to Unity, more than 6 million registered developers use the platform, and 770 million gamers enjoy Unity-made titles. The software has become to small-team game development what the Adobe suite is to creative professionals in many other lines of work. (2016)

Axon’s comments broaden the influence of Unity 3D as it is credited with both altering the independent gaming development scene and marketplace opportunities. For instance, many titles built around the Unity engine are available through streaming platforms such as Steam. Sylvio Drouin, head of technical research for Unity, explains the game engine’s success is due to the fact that Unity 3D allows developers without strong programming skills to still produce games: ‘The thousands of game engines that appeared over the past 20 years are usually an engine where you have to start coding in C++ and call APIs and build the scaffolding yourself,’ he said. ‘That makes it very targeted at engineers that

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understand what they’re doing, while Unity is very asset-driven.’ (quoted in Axon 2016)

Making a case for why Unity 3D has been so effective as an off-the-shelf technology in the game industry and marketplace, Joseph Hocking makes a similar claim and suggests the game engine reduces the barrier for people coming into games design: ‘it’s . . . one of the most accessible modern tools of novice game developers’ (2018: 3). The impact of the easy accessibility of Unity 3D celebrated by Drouin and Hocking on game design has been mixed. For some too many Unity games have been produced and these cheap-to-buy games are swamping the marketplace. Many of these games are perceived as generic and uninspired and Axon, based on his interviews with games designers, suggests that Unity 3D’s accessibility has had the effect of narrowing down the range of game conventions (2016). In her study of working practices in an international Canadian-based game studio, Jennifer Whitson gives further insight into the influences of Unity 3D. Whitson interviewed people who worked with both Unity 3D and also 3D Studio Max, and as she describes: In this sense, tools such as Unity 3D and 3D Studio Max provide a shared focus and language, helping teams dictate the scope, form and schedule of game development. Technocratic rationalization and instrumentality are commonly associated with software production. But, rather than a mutely obedient tool, software exerts agency of its own and is seen to exhibit magical, even agential properties during game development. (2018)

Whitson uses the phrase ‘voodoo software’ to characterize the ways software can thwart its users and seemingly take on an inexplicable or magical life of its own. The wider point she makes about software having agency or agential properties during game development resonates with my comments on entanglement and Everything. The entanglement does not only reside with players but also with the development of the procedural universe with its different conventions of time and space. In an interview for Rolling Stone Will Partin asked OReilly about the influence of Unity 3D on his design choices. Unity 3D was involved in many processes including scale transitions, thought generation, time dilation, sound warping, object transformations, weather systems, day-night cycles, camera effects, lighting and level tiling (@30000fps 2017). For OReilly the constraints of Unity 3D’s conventions introduced problems that required finding a work around and these solutions have led to innovations in a game. OReilly and Unity

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3D both make contributions with their agencies folding together in the process of designing the game: Those are inseparable qualities for me. You always have certain constraints, and you’re always trying to find the most interesting solutions to those. With things like the flopping animation, which is what catches most people’s eye, it’s a very deliberate decision, but it was also a solution to help me do all the other things going on in the game. There are lots of things in Everything that aren’t ‘realistic,’ but are the most interesting solution to particular problems in order to create a totality. (quoted in Partin 2017)

OReilly’s description of working with Unity 3D give insight into a relational engagement between artist and software. In addition to the influences running in the wider assemblage of the game’s production, solutions are generated with the aim of not only solving a specific problem but also in relation to the wider needs of the game. In this creative situation the artist and software and the potentialities of the game are entangled. As argued earlier a player is entangled in the digital operations of a game, they do not entirely control the process and the process does not entirely control them either. In an equivalent way to OReilly working with Unity 3D what connects is a set of hybrid relationships in which human and technological agencies fold together. Everything’s autoplay option pushes this further since control is ceded to the system. When the controller is put down or left untouched, after a brief pause the game starts playing itself either through the default autoplay settings or according to those a player might have set. When I set my controller down the entity I controlled was a ceramic pot in a sandy landscape. On coming back from time to time to look at the screen I discovered that autoplay had added pylons and smoking Victorian chimneys to a landscape initially populated only with adobestyle houses. The ecology of the game had clearly moved on and in this newly evolved environment I co-existed as a succulent amongst many other succulents before becoming a flotilla of cruise liners skimming over the sand, provoking the game thought bubble: ‘I’d have no problems if I could fall in love and eat sand.’ Autoplay then moved up a level to be a sand planet, spending time spinning as an alien planet before becoming a lenticular galaxy awash with Viking Landers and geckos. Commenting on the autoplay option for Everything OReilly remarks: I love autoplay. Sometimes, you want to engage with Everything, and sometimes you can just let it go. That ties directly into Everything in terms of thinking about

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what’s motivating you. All of nature is essentially doing itself, by itself, to itself. Autoplay is an expression of that. (quoted in Partin 2017)

Reilly here again invokes the idea of nature as a system that does itself. In the case of autoplay, though, Everything does not straightforwardly replicate nature and works instead according to the rules and processes of connectivity around which Everything is designed. In her review of Everything Kat Brewster comments that the game builds on Mountain’s ability to engage its audience in quite individual ways even though it was procedurally generated and builds on core ideas: Everything takes this strange comfort of the procedurally generated personal to a universal scale, and it is good. It’s really good. Everything is a game that knows what its core strengths are, and it does not shy away from them: everything persists, and everything is connected. (2017a)

Brewster goes on to suggest that autoplay is one of the best features of Everything because the game will do whatever it wants and according to its systems and processes of persistence and connectivity. With an entangled view we can go further. Autoplay is a coming together of two sets of processes. The holistically defined universe in which things accumulate and everything is connected, and computationally defined actions through which objects and data persist and whose connections are digitally mediated. In the absence of input from a player the digital operability of time and space is fully foregrounded. And with digital operability more foregrounded further dimensions of the performativity of the game software become clarified. The capacity of software to seamlessly connect is neither entirely predictable nor repeatable. Kat Brewster suggests that this is one of the pleasures of Everything: To some, this pleasure of letting a game play itself may come across as counterintuitive. But there is its own sort of pleasure in watching a thing create itself again and again, to know that the landscape either you or the game has created will never happen again . . . This is your planck length of the onedimensional category. It is no one else’s. (2017a)

Stepping back from the visual forms and the at times absurd seeming transitions (from snowflake to chocolate chip cookie to the spiral shape of treponema pallidum aka. syphilis), as players we are confronted with the distinct materiality of digital games. Everything is not only objects that persist and connect since it makes us more aware that everything is data. Pushing this further. Not only does Everything give players a perspective on the physical ecology of our planet it gives a perspective on our digital ecology and that turns out to be messy too.

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How we experience the connectivity of Everything is down to the action of algorithms and the ways they generate and operate on data. The switching between spatial and temporal scales on which player experience is founded in Everything are possible only because it is data that connects. Data, of course, is always what connects in a computer game. More usually than not, unless a glitch occurs or when in Everything a disaster happens our focus on the figure of an avatar. And avatars divert attention away from underpinning computation and the different operabilities of human and digital scales of time and space. Mark B.N. Hansen, when writing about consciousness and digital memory makes the point that having access to data from the neural processes of brain activity is not the same as having access to consciousness: technical access to data of sensibility and to the neural processes constituting brain time operate in lieu of any possible phenomenological mode of experience. Twenty-first-century media operate on and with data that cannot take the form of contents of consciousness, that simply cannot be lived by consciousness. (2015: 221)

Following on from Hansen’s observations on consciousness, Everything is operating on and with data. I am not suggesting Everything is in anyway a literal version of consciousness, indeed neither does OReilly nor the many commentaries on the game see it as such. What can be said, though, is that through the actions of its game engine and procedural generation Everything reveals the set of processes through which digital technologies operate. As the integrity of operable time and space is transformed the underlying materiality of the system is revealed to be algorithms and data. When objects connect and persist it is because they are connected by and as data.

Conclusion Writing about a blackbox society in which digital process control money and information Frank Pasquale argues algorithms determine the contours of that world (2016). Though this is literally the case in all digitally created games No Man’s Sky and Everything offer different insights to our understanding of algorithmic contours. Where No Man’s Sky privileges a human-scaled cover-up of mediated contours Everything puts the transformative potential of digital processes at the centre of its mechanics. Consequently, the seamless performativity of Everything’s system is revealed as an algorithmic fix and one

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over which we only have partial control. As a challenge to the conventions of how players interact with games autoplay underlines the dispersal of control between a player and system by taking it to its limits. Of idle games and autoplay more generally, Sonia Fizek argues that autoplay both subverts the contemporary understanding of games as interactive and also decentralizes the players: Video games as instances of everyday technoculture, as such operate within the premises of digitality, technology, simulations and software. The digital and networked nature of the computer calls for a decentralized understanding of the player as an active agent. (2018: 209)

Everything emphasizes such a decentralization in several ways. Through its explicit reflections on relationality amongst entities in a universe, the different operability of space and time speaks to a network of procedural systems within the game, and the autoplay option brings into view the fact that algorithms operate on their own terms. Writing about the impact of digital technologies in society more widely, John Cheney-Lippold remarks: ‘Algorithmic agents make us and make the knowledges that compose us, but they do so on their own terms. And one of the primary terms of an algorithm is that everything is represented as data’ (2017: 11). The materialcultural narrative of our entanglement with Everything includes the cultural influences of player expectations, the holist philosophies informing OReilly’s game design and material influences which include the digital operations of the games mechanics where what connects is a set of hybrid relationships enacted through the game’s algorithms. These hybrid relations have fluid boundaries where human and technological agencies fold together and neither are in control. OReilly refers to Everything’s systems as a totality, a connected universe. A large part of the celebration of Everything draws from its reminder to be mindful of the ways our modes of living accumulates as positive and negative influences on the world around us. The totality of Everything is also about living with digital influences, data-based processes that increasingly underpin our experiences of time and space. These too have positive and negative influences on the world around us.

Notes 1 These are available at http://www​.davidoreilly​.com​/eye​-of​-the​-dream and http:// www​.davidoreilly​.com/

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2 The end credits of Everything cite several philosophers, including Seneca, Epictetus, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Arthur Schopenhauer. 3 The different temporal progression of larger size entities is described the help menu of the game.

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It seems an obvious thing to say that digital images catch our notice as pictures on our screens. What is less familiar is thinking of images as a surface underpinned by material-cultural narratives. Digital images and their circulating production culture draw our attention to these narratives even as they distract us too. Take the computer-simulated water in Moana. Claims about the realisticness of the imagery often keep us at its surface, cueing our attention to move between water in actuality and images of water in the animated feature. Throughout Invisible Digital I have taken a look underneath the surface of images by beginning with the production culture around the software used by artists to create images. When we look between image and production materials another kind of mapping becomes possible. Claims about realisticness become an avenue through which to trace out the multiple purposes a word such as realisticness serves. As my analysis of VFX and animated water shows, the deceptively simple description of water as realistic sits at an intersection of influences, those of software capabilities, artist abilities, a production’s context and its aesthetic, temporal and financial economies. Our understanding of digital processes occurs not only because of the imagery they produce but also via their emergence through cultural and technological mediations. As a participant in these mediations the word realisticness becomes a vehicle for ideas only some of which refer to a mimicry of nature. Realisticness operates as a stand-in, a cover over the contradictions in far from neutral production disclosures. Instead of being distracted by images as realistic we can see them as markers of converging cultural, organizational and technological influences, which give access to material-cultural narratives about the potentialities of software inflected with agendas of people and institutions. The role of software in these intersecting influences particularly engaged my attention. One of the challenges when starting out to write Invisible Digital was to find ways of talking about software. Unlike images you cannot look at software as an object, directly assess its effectiveness or draw out cultural and/or political insights. Because it operates via the mediation of a digital system software is invisible. But there are many ways in which software becomes indirectly visible,

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whether through its actions in generating images produced by VFX artists, animators and game designers or through widely circulating production materials. Throughout Invisible Digital I took digital images and their associated production culture as a starting point for my analysis and used them to draw out the material-cultural narratives of software. As we have seen in Moana, No Man’s Sky and Everything, production cultures often rely on hero narratives which make the operations of particular software central, explicitly celebrating it or them as key innovations of a production. Beyond existing as examples of the self-promotion of a team or studio, production culture materials offer a way into software through the lens of what it does and how it is conceived and performs through discourse. Production cultures are a rich source of analyses for moving image scholars whether in relation to software or other kinds of questions. Using production culture as a way into software gives access both to the way artists use it and also the myriad associations that coalesce around software. Drawing out these associations relies on the relational approach described in the case studies of Invisible Digital. I have taken the productions of Moana, No Man’s Sky and Everything to be assemblages, a series of interrelated elements that co-influence and co-respond to one another. And it is within assemblages that the relational associations of software become clear as material-cultural narratives. Through the case studies of Invisible Digital I argued that software is not simply spoken about in these narratives but is entangled too. Software shapes what is said about it in the sense that there is a flow of influence from the operations of software to its performativity. In this way software is no longer just a sophisticated toolset but also a carrier and influencer of meanings. It moves beyond its capacity to be known only as code and emerges as both material and cultural. A feature of production assemblages that has interested me is the ways wider concerns evident in digital culture percolate into and are expressed through production culture. While disclosures at first seem solely focused on the matters of a production such as water simulation or procedural generation, they are equally engaged with and are making contributions to ongoing debates in digital culture. The material-cultural narratives of Moana, No Man’s Sky and Everything engage with and circulate ideas about the capacity of computational systems to model actuality, the promise of seamless connectivity, digitally scaled spaces made familiar by being configured at human scales, or when the latter reconfiguration does not take hold, an awareness that digital mediation re-scales our experiences of time and space. Through exploring and drawing out these

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narratives the work of Invisible Digital has been to place software as a marker of converging cultural, organizational and technological influences. Taking this relational approach shows how software takes on a multiplicity of meanings. These arise in part from its materiality and functionality such as its capacity to simulate volumes of particles with water-like motion, or generate game elements, and in part from its entanglements with cultural and organizational discourses. I have demonstrated that software gathers meaning through its material operations and discursive associations and Tim Ingold’s description of objects as ‘gatherings of materials in movement’ seems especially apt (2012: 439). What is important to also appreciate, though, is that such movements are not linear progressions but snag and catch on a range of influences. The contours of the material-cultural narratives of software are based on a push-pull of multiple influences. Amongst these influences software is not inert but both a vehicle and also contributor of ideas. Thinking of software as both vehicle and contributor allows us to understand their material-cultural narratives as fully entangled: software and its actions make a difference to how we make sense of the world. I finish Invisible Digital with some further observations on how software is mapped across human and technological concerns and to do so look briefly at the animated feature Inside Out (2015). To this point, I have primarily discussed the impact of procedural animation on environmental entities including the water of Moana and landscapes of No Man’s Sky and Everything. In contrast the production culture of Inside Out emphasizes the design of the Emotions, characters central to the film. This gives an opportunity to take into account how digital materialities also impact our understandings of how we conceive of characters and aspects of their humanness. Responses to the animated feature suggest that parents and children recognized their own emotions in the human-like qualities embedded in the design of these characters. Their design, however, can mapped both onto human-like qualities and technological ones via discussions of lighting algorithms and particle animation software.

Going Inside Out Inside Out was released to Oscar-winning acclaim in 2015 with critics particularly praising Pixar’s innovative central character, eleven-year-old Riley. In designing Riley the director (Pete Docter) and his team created both

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her exterior and interior world views. The story opens with Riley’s birth and follows the accumulation of her childhood emotions and memories. The plot turns on Riley’s family relocating across the United States from the northern state of Minnesota to San Francisco in California. Given the significant distance involved, Riley loses her friends and the familiar location in which her childhood has been grounded. This is a huge disruption and so any excitement about the move quickly gives way to sadness and loss as Riley struggles to establish friendships at her new school and hold onto memories of her past. Inside Out captivated its audience by exploring these fraught transitions through five emotions populating Riley’s interior world – Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger. Dominating the critical praise for Inside Out was applause for the insightful explorations of Riley’s response to her changed life as commentators often noted how well it conveyed tangled human emotions. By considering the production culture of Inside Out I develop another dimension of our understanding of emotions. The technologies of the production not only depict emotions as characters, the materialities of these technologies also shape our understanding of both the emotions and also digital entities. The material-cultural narrative of Inside Out shows how a mapping between human and technologies entangles something seemingly so fundamentally human – emotions – with an appreciation of particle simulation technologies. The production culture celebrations of Inside Out both expand on the design of the emotions onto human-like qualities and go beyond that perspective by looking at how Pixar’s character design relies on RenderMan’s lighting algorithms and particle animation software. In addition to highlighting the traditional craft of Pixar, by which I mean the character design, body shape, movements, gestures and costumes, particles were used to give each of the emotions their own quality of effervescence. The characterization of these emotions as effervescence or as a kind of fluid energy emerged from the material possibilities of particle simulations. The production assemblage of Inside Out is a place where particle simulations are not just a tool used by animators. The material properties of particle simulations afford types of character design and this is fully exploited in the design of the emotions. Not only that, thinking about the emotions in terms of particle animation has potential to add contours in our perception of characters in Inside Out and also particles and data in digital culture more widely.

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Starting with the familiar: mapping the human The marketing and publicity surrounding the release of Inside Out encouraged audiences to map human qualities onto the design of the emotions. Director Pete Docter, for instance, explains the inspiration for the film by saying: I noticed my daughter growing up, being a little less goofy and wacky and funny and a little more shy and quiet because she had turned 11. And at the same time, I was looking at different ideas for a film and thought about emotions as characters. (quoted in McQuarrie 2015)

Docter’s comments locate the character design with the specific experiences of a child growing up. Further publicity materials explain how psychologists provided insights into the science of emotions. Dacher Keltner emphasized how Inside Out strengthens an understanding of our experience of sometimes turbulent emotions as a normal part of growing up and living (Judd 2015). Pixar’s celebration of its own traditions of character design similarly map success onto a distillation of human-like behaviours into characters, a process reliant on both designers and animators. Within a production pipeline, character design by a team of artists is followed by animators bringing those characters to life on-screen by giving them the personality and movements suited to the storyworld in each film. Technology is central to the process of computer animation: Animators bring the story to life, posing characters to act out each scene. They start by breaking down an action into a series of poses called key frames that mark out important positions. Then, they use a computer program to describe how the object moves in between those key frames so that the resulting animation conveys the desired emotions. (Science Behind Pixar n.d.)

In their statements Pixar go onto to argue that automated movements are also central to the practice of giving characters human-like qualities: While animators focus on acting, simulation programmers create motion that makes scenes feel alive and believable. Some simulations – hair, fur, and clothing – respond to the way a character moves. Other simulations recreate natural phenomena, such as fire or water. (Science Behind Pixar n.d.)

Though Pixar’s commentary places an emphasis on the human-like qualities of animated figures the digital qualities of these characters also emerge in the wider production assemblage.

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Moving outside the familiar: Mapping the digital Alongside the understanding that successfully crafting memorable characters relies on inspiration from human life another set of relations emerge when we look at what digital technologies bring to the process of design. By bringing in details about lighting and particle animation, I explore how the thinking behind a character is a complex mix provided by insights from technological contexts as well as human ones. Consequently, our understanding of emotions as characters shifts when a stronger sense of the material dimensions of animation technologies rounds out our responses to the characters in Inside Out. The emotion Joy is a helpful place to start tracking this idea since she is the main character in Riley’s interior world. The production commentaries on her design offers a rich source of thinking about the emotions as digital objects. Descriptions of the emotions yield associations and connections with the material properties found in particle animation. Docter makes clear that their design is meant to evoke the idea of energy as opposed to little people: ‘The look and design of the Emotions had to remind people that they are personifications of feelings,’ says Docter. ‘They’re not little people. They’re Emotions. They’re made of energy – they’re made up of thousands of particles, which kind of looks like energy. We wanted to capture what emotions feel like – the shapes, the colors – as well as their personalities.’ (quoted in Seymour 2015)

Interestingly, associating energy with digitally derived particles means Docter sidesteps connections to the looser notion of physically embodied energy. How we feel in ourselves, whether energized or de-energized, flat, up or down. This emphasis on energy is reiterated in the production notes too as producer Jonas Rivera says of Joy: ‘She’s full of life and energy, which led us to the physical makeup of the Emotions. We decided they should all be made up of energy’ (Inside Out Production Notes 2015). Similarly, animation supervisor Shawn Krause remarks: ‘Joy’s high-energy, fun-loving, over-caffeinated . . . She’s infectious – a big ball of energy’, while character art director Albert Lozano supplies: ‘I knew she had to emit joy’ (Inside Out Production Notes 2015). The choice of the word emit by Lozano is instructive as it illuminates a connection with both lighting and particle animation. In commenting on Joy’s design Angelique Reisch, the character lighting lead on Inside Out says:

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‘She is the main character and we needed an elegant solution,’ Reisch continued. ‘RenderMan was working on what they call geometric area lights, or a geolight. What this light does is allow you to select a model and then turn that model into a light source.’ (quoted in Desowitz 2015)

The elegant solution to designing Joy described by Reisch relied on an upgrade to RenderMan. After this upgrade it was possible to automatically add light to Joy as well as illuminate the background scenery and her companions. Consequently, animators no longer needed to manually insert lighting to each scene when Joy is on-screen (Vanian 2015). Joy’s striking inner glow is a consequence of using a geolight to light the figure from the inside out and so her figure emits as a light source. As such, Joy is both a character who acts within a scene and a design feature informing its composition: she maps onto both human and technological qualities. The relations between her and the other figures is not then simply about personality and movement but also how she casts light in that space, which is a very different kind of relationality. Reisch’s further comments on Joy not only open out her status as a light source but also bring into play another technological dimension in their description of the two ways in which particle animation contributed to character design: Since Joy’s the brightest character, she’s the only one that casts light . . . the inner glow was shared by all five emotions, with the procedural particles close to the skin made by the character department and the outer particle sim created by the effects team. (quoted in Desowitz 2015)

The task of crafting the energy of the emotions fell to the effects team supervised by Gary Bruins. The team developed a rig that registered the movement of particles by changing colour and opacity and of which Bruins says: ‘It really supported the idea that she’s so joyful that her energy cannot really be contained’ (Inside Out Production Notes 2015). Bruins’ point that energy cannot be easily contained turns out to the case for the procedural generation of particles too. As Reisch says: ‘The particles close to the skin are procedural, created in the character department,’ says lighting artist Angelique Reisch. ‘We tested them in lighting, and it took a lot of testing. Sometimes they’d poke through the mouth bag and come out of an eye.’ (quoted in Robertson 2015)

Descriptions of lighting and particle animation accentuate how these technologies afford decisions about character design. They demonstrate too

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how our understandings of Inside Out’s emotions map onto an entangled mix of technological and well as human contexts. The very idea that Joy could be designed to fizz and glow with energy relies on a combination of practical digital solutions and also digitally informed thinking. They also reveal that particle simulations are not always under control since they too have degrees of unpredictability. For Pixar designing characters with humanity is vitally important to creating connections between an audience and characters on-screen. This is a familiar position and very much within our comfort zone. The materialcultural narrative of Inside Out pushes beyond that familiar zone. Production narratives about lighting and particle simulation reveal solution-oriented and innovative approaches to animating the characters. They also bring into the open connections running between the design of the emotions and the use of particle simulations. What emerges is an understanding of Inside Out’s emotions that draws out the ways in which human and technological perspectives contour one another. This last point is central to Invisible Digital with its focus on the ways in which we understand ourselves and our place in the world relationally through human and technological perspectives. There are many ways of thinking through and challenging how moving images in films, games and animations are informed by and propagate perspectives on the politics and culture of humans. Though these perspectives are entangled with the materiality and culture of technological objects, how these mediate our understanding of images has been less explored. Invisible Digital proposes a mode of analysis through which digital processes behind image production can be articulated as material-cultural narratives. In this analysis software is neither just a toolset for making images nor a neutral vehicle for collaboration. Rather, it is part of a complex interplay of influences that occur in production assemblages and these mediate our understandings of images and digital processes. Material-cultural narratives give insight not only to our understanding of images but also to how we experience a technologically mediated and datafied world.

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Index 3DS Studio Max  44, 156 20th Century Fox  80 2012 (2009)  23, 32 AAA games  97 Aardman  30, 31 abstraction  59, 144–5, 153 Academy Awards 2008  44 Actor-Network-Theory  7 Affine-Particle-in-Cell method (APIC)  35, 41, 56, 73 agency  7, 44, 45 algorithms  49, 54 Amato, Alba  96 Animal Logic  29, 30 Antz (1998)  27, 42 APIC. See Affine-Particle-in-Cell method art direction  36, 42, 65–6 artist control  44, 52, 54 Assassin’s Creed game series  122 Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (2018)  127 Assassin’s Creed Origins (2017)  17 assemblage  5–6, 49, 95 Atkinson, Sarah  2, 10 authorization  71 authorizing  59, 60 Autodesk Maya  52, 136 avatar  92–4 Axon, Samuel  155 Bao (2018)  68 Barad, Karen  8, 9, 112 and boundary formation  112–14 and material and discursive  112 BBC. See British Broadcasting Company Bennett, Jane  111 Big Hero 6 (2014)  77 Blue Planet TV documentary series  21–2, 28 Blue Sky Studio  82 Bogost, Ian  7–8, 100, 136 boundary sedimentation  117–19

Boysen, Ben Lukas  141 Brewster, Kat  158 British Broadcasting Company (BBC)  22 Brown, Dylan  27 Bruins, Gary  169 By the Sea (2015)  21 Caldwell, John. T.  3, 4, 9 Callon, Michel  62 Catmull, Ed  81 CFD. See Computational Fluid Dynamics character-like protrusions  78 character-like water  54, 67, 72 Cheney-Lippold, John  160 The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008)  23 Chun, Wendy H.K.  61 Cinema 4D  44 Civilisation (1991)  127 Clark, Justin  105–6 Coco (2018)  16 code  33, 59–60 Coleman, Rob  29 collaboration  76, 81 Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)  37–42, 45 Cone, Justin  135 connectivity  49–50, 71, 74 Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost  7 Couldry, Nick and Andreas Hepp  12 Couldry, Nick and Ulises Mejias  74 D’Amaro, Josh  70 datafication  134, 147, 150 Dead Cells (2017)  98 De Fede, Damien  100, 136, 147 DeLanda, Manuel  5–6, 17 Deleuze Felix and Gilles Guattari  5 Denning, Peter and Craig Martell  59, 144–5, 153 The Descendants (2011)  21 Desowitz, Bill  29

Index De Wlidt, Lars  94, 126, 128 digital footprint  140, 151 digital materiality  33 discursive  8–9 Disney  3, 16, 32, 50, 69–70, 80–2 Disney Parks  69 dissipation  40, 41, 56–7 distributed computing  78 Docter, Pete  165, 167, 168 documentary  21 Dooghan, Daniel  127 Dreamworks  27 Driskill, Hank  52, 78–9, 81 Drouin, Silvio  155–6 Drucker, Johanna  34 Dwarf Fortress (2006)  98, 114 Elite (1984)  97 Emerson, Steve  31–2 emotions  166, 168 Empire: Total War (2009)  127 Ensmenger, Nathan  75, 129 Ensslin, Astrid  92, 102 entanglement  8–9, 60–2, 108–9, 112 Erler, Michel  142, 155 Eulerian  40, 56 EVE Online (2003–)  122 Everything (2016)  11, 89, 133, 163–5 and autoplay  157 and connectedness  137, 142, 153 and connectivity  133, 148 and digital scale  138, 148, 149 and entanglement  154, 156, 158 and mechanics  137–9 and philosophy  137, 141, 142 External World (2010)  136 Eye of the Dream (2018)  135 Ezra, Elizabeth  6 Far Cry (2018)  17, 122, 123 Faroukhmanesh, Megan  134 Ferziger, Joel and Milovan Perić  39 FFX. See Foundation Effects Final Fantasy (2001–)  122 Finding Dory (2016)  20, 29–30, 69 Finding Nemo (2003)  20, 27, 29, 68 Finn, Ed  46, 85

189

Fizek, Sonia  160 Flowline  23, 42, 44 Fonoti, Dionne  83 Forsler, Ingrid and Julia Volkova  10 Foster, Nick and Dimitri Metaxas  43 Foundation Effects (FFX)  52, 53 fractals and game design  97 Frei, Vincent  16 Frost, Ben  72, 79–80 Furniss, Maureen  144 Future Unfolding (2017)  98 Garrelts, Nate  99 genesis sequence  42 ‘A Glitch is a Glitch’ (2013)  136 Good, Owen  90 Gravity (2013)  10 Gray, Jonathan  2 Greengard, Samuel  83 Guttag, John  146 Hansen, Mark B.N.  159 Happy Feet films  20, 28–30, 32 Harbord, Janet  149 Harlow, F.  37, 39–40, 42, 56 Hayles, N. Katherine  60 Heaven, Douglas  125 Hello Games  5, 90, 110, 123 Her (2013)  136 Hobsbawm, Janet  74 Hocking, Joseph  156 Holliday, Christopher  68 Houdini  30, 44, 54, 68 Husbands, Lilly  6 hybrid connections  146–7 hyperion  52, 73, 82 hyperrealism  26, 28, 67 idle games  135, 160 ILM. See Industrial Light and Magic Imperialism (1997)  127 Inception (2010)  10 Incredibles 2 (2018)  68 Industrial Light and Magic (ILM)  19, 50, 80–2 Ingold, Tim  108–10, 165 Inside Out (2015)  165 Inside Out and Joy and lighting  169–70

190 Inside Out and particle animation  169, 170 Into the Breach (2018)  98 Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Opperman  8–9 Jiang, Chenfanfu  41, 57, 58 Joe Danger (2010)  111 Keltner, Dacher  167 Keogh, Brian  94 Khatchadourian, Raffi  116, 122 Kirschenbaum, Matthew  33 Kitchen, Rob  54, 58, 80 Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)  20, 31, 32 LaFrance, Adrienne  73, 83 Lagrangian  40, 56 Laika  31 Lee, Ang  24, 25 The Lego Movie (2014)  20, 30–2 Lehner, Alexander  154 Leonardi. Paul  34 Le Roy, Frederik and Vanderbeeken, Robrecht  22 Life of Pi (2012)  20, 24, 29, 32 Lim, Chong-U  94 Linneman, John  18 The Little Mermaid (1989)  26, 27 Lord, Peter  31 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)  23 Los Alamos  37, 56 Lou (2017)  68 McKendrick, Innes  114, 124 Mackenzie, Adrian  34, 59–61 Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)  36 magical  26, 32, 69–71 The Magical World of Disney  69 Maloney, Michael  60 Marino, Mark  61 Martin, Tim  125 Mass Effect (2007–)  122, 123 material-cultural narrative  9 material and discursive  9

Index materialism  7 materiality  34, 108 Matterhorn  82 Mayeda, Dale  78–9 Metroid (1987–)  122, 123 Mihailova, Mihaela  10 Miller, Emelin  127 Minecraft (2011)  94, 99, 103, 120, 127 Moana (2016)  4, 11, 19, 146, 163–5 Morin, Roc  105 Morley, Andrew  31 Moss, Richard  98 Mountain (2014)  135–7, 140, 155 Mukherjee, Souvik  127 Murray, Janet  100 Murray, Sean  90, 104, 110, 114, 116–18, 120–4 Murray, Soraya  126 Narita, Hiroaki  71–2 Navier-Stokes equation  38, 39, 53, 56 noise errors  40, 41, 56–7 noise generation algorithms  120 No Man’s Sky (2016–)  11, 89, 104, 163–5 No Man’s Sky and avatar  113, 125 and colonialism  126 and colour palettes  118–19 and fan activities  111, 125–6 and game mechanics  124 and human scale  113 and PCG  105, 112, 120 and relationality  107 North, Dan  24 Oakes, Danny  115–16 Object Oriented Ontology (OOO)  7 Object Oriented Philosophy  7 Oceanic Trust  75, 82 Odermatt, Kyle  84 Onwards (2020)  68 OOO. See Object Oriented Ontology operational functionality  50, 70, 71 OReilly, David  90, 100, 134–8, 141–4, 146–8, 150–3, 157–8 Ortiz Frau, Eduardo  141

Index Pacific Island Culture  75, 83 Pallant, Christopher  68 Palmer, Sean  75, 77 paratexts  60, 61 Parker, Laura  139 Parkin, Simon  142 particle/grid simulation method  75 particle animation  42 particle-in-cell solutions (PIC)  40, 41, 56 particle simulation  73 PCGamer  97–8 Pedersen, Leif  3 perceptual realism  24 performance vs. performative  63, 64 performative and performativity  12 performative materiality  34 performative software  59, 61 Perlin, Ken  120 Perlin noise  120 The Persistence (2018)  98 Phillips, Amanda  103 photorealism  19 PhysBam  23 physics-based  33, 36, 45, 60, 64–5 PIC. See Particle-in-cell solutions Pinocchio (1940)  26, 27 Piper (2016)  3, 68–9 Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists! (2012)  20, 30–2 Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007)  23 Pixar  3, 16, 27, 50, 68, 80–2, 165 Pixar and character design  167 platform studies  130 PlayStation  97 PlayStation 4 (PS4)  134, 135 PlayStation Vita  97 Please Say Something (2008)  136 Poseidon (2005)  20, 22, 23, 29 Powers of Ten (1968 and 1977)  149 Price, David  68 Priestman, Chris  133 Prince, Stephen  10, 24, 30, 42 procedural animation  1, 10 procedural content generation  11, 90, 95 procedural games  96 procedural rhetoric  101, 102

191

production assemblage  5 production culture studies  2–4 production pipeline  52, 75 PS4. See PlayStation 4 pseudo-random noise  120 Purdom, Clayton  126 Purse, Lisa  3–4, 10, 24 Quarantine Dreams (2020)  135 Ramos, Erin  57 RealFlow  23, 42, 44 realism  18–19 realistic  18 realisticness  4, 18, 163 Red Dead Redemption (2010–)  122 Reeves, Bill  42 Reisch, Angelique  168–9 relationality  6–9, 108 relational theory  6 RenderMan  3, 30, 82, 166, 169 Revenant (2015)  16 Rhythm and Hues Dynamic Effects  44 RIS. See Rix Integration System Rivera, Jonas  168 Rix Integration System (RIX)  3, 30, 68 Rocheron, Guillaume  24, 25 Rogue (1980)  96 Ross, Miriam  18 rule building  145, 146 Scanline  23 Schwerdtfeger, Conor  16 The Sentinel (1986)  96 Seymour, Mike  37, 42, 44–5 Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018)  18 Shaker, Noor  11, 100 Sheldon, Rebecca  62 Short, Tanya  98, 114 Shurer, Osnat  83 Sicart, Miguel  101, 102 SideFX Houdini  52, 53 The Silly Symphonies (1929–1939)  26 Simplex noise  120 simulation  17 simulation software  23 Smed, Jouni and Hakonen, Harri  121

192 Smith, Alvy Ray  42 Sneed, Amy  53 software and affordance  34 and materiality  34 and performativity  34, 64 software studies  11–12 Solver  53 Sony  5, 110, 123 Sotamaa, Olli  101 speculative realism  7–8 Speedtree  116 Spelunky (2008)  97, 98 splash  35, 50, 53, 54 Stam, Josh  37, 38, 40, 43 Stanton, Andrew  28, 68 Star Trek: Wrath of Khan (1982)  42 steam  97, 155 Stomakhin, Alexey  20, 32–3, 36, 65–7, 69 Stomakhin, Alexey and Andrew Selle  36 stop-motion  31 stylized realism  67, 68, 72, 84 Taylor, T. L.  5, 94–5, 102, 110 Telotte, J. P.  68, 71 Teran, Joseph  55 terrain generation and noise patterns  119 and No Man’s Sky  115 Thompson, Jim and Berbank-Green, Barnaby  91–2 Thompson, Kirsten Moana  69 Titanic (1996)  20, 29 Toy Story (1995)  68 Toy Story IV (2019)  68 transcalar  73, 89, 95 Tremblay, André  99, 103–4 Tron (1982)  120 Turkle, Sherry  17, 45 Turney, Drew  15 Turnock, Julie  19

Index uber noise  121 Uncharted 4 (2016)  17 unity  134, 136, 147, 155–7 Van Dijck, José  74 VFX and fluid simulation  41 and labour practices  10 and marketing  2 and realistic effects  16, 23–4 video games and water simulation  17–18 water and art direction  24–5, 32 and cel-animation  26–7 and CG animation  27 and characterization  24–5, 36 water expressive  51 Waterworld (1995)  23 Watts, A.  91, 141, 142 Wells, P.  26–7, 144 Welsh, Oli  106, 107, 126 West, Marlon  73–4, 86 Westenhofer, Bill  24–5 Whalen, Andrew  148, 154 Whissel, Kristen  10 White, Sam  120 Whitely, David  28 Whitson, Jennifer  156 Wiltshire, Alex  152 Wolf, Mark J.P.  96, 114, 142 Wolff, Ellen  16 The Wonderful World of Disney  69 Xbox  97 York, Kaya  142 Zecker, Andreas  98 Zhi, Yongning and Bridson, Robert  40–1, 57 Ziewitz, Malte  54–5, 107

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