The first challenge was to look at gaming not as a thing to play, but as a really interesting topic to analyze from various perspectives. I’ve gone through my whole gaming library of over 200 games and hand picked a game called “Assassins Creed: Brotherhood”. I had 3 really good reasons to pick this game. First of all, I already had over 200 hours of gametime in it, so I was fairly experienced with pretty much everything in it. Secondly, the game provided me with a really well made and detailed Virtual Map of the city of Rome during the Renaissance Era. And thirdly, by coincidence, I’ve travelled in and around Rome - Italy this summer. So, I had many photos that I personally took, and experiences still fresh in my mind. Starting from these bases, I’ve begun my re-photography experiments.

    Throughout my life, I’ve slowly adapted myself to play games in a competitive way, and because of that, I forgot how to actually take a step back and appreciate the fine details, the essential elements in the game, and to actually experience the world that is around me virtually. I had to work around this, so I’ve came up with something new. To eliminate the need to focus on objectives or enemies, I’ve altered the games code to hide the user interface. I’ve also made the game 1st person viewed so I could actually be in the shoes of the ingame character. I was literally experiencing the world from the point of view of the main character, during the Renaissance Era!

    After hand picking which Photographs I’ll use from my Italy trip, I’ve spent hours and hours running around the Virtual Rome, trying to find the exact spots I was at in the real photographs, and during this whole adventure, I’ve slowly learned to appreciate the difference between actually visiting Rome and being there Virtually. We are too focused on recreating places as they are, creating virtual realities, trying to imitate being actually there and creating a false mindset of “I’ve already seen it”. In the end, we forget to appreciate experiencing the beauties of the real life.