I just got back from seeing the movie of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When my six-year-old daughter asked me what my favorite part of the movie was (hers was the sound of the stone table cracking), I said I thought it was incredible the way the animals looked so real.
“What do you mean? The animals were real!” she insisted. We had a short discussion about Aslan’s being computer-generated and she refused to believe that it was not a real lion. Do lions talk, I asked? (She is almost 7 after all.) “No, stupid,” she said, but this did not convince her that somehow, the physical “lion” was not flesh and blood. I tried to explain that the lion was made in a computer, but, trying to see the problem from her point of view, I began to get a little image of lion running around inside the space of the CRT and then being mysteriously released into the real world. It wasn’t getting any clearer so I changed topics to the possibility of reading the books, which suddenly seemed a much more straightforward proposition.
Although I’ve been involved with and thinking about computer graphics technology for a long time now (relatively speaking—over 10 years), and the assumption that real-time realistic graphics would become available has never been questioned, I was still amazed at the impact of such real-looking beavers talking, and even though Aslan was a little blurry for my tastes—too much filtering?—he moved and had a fur and eyes and teeth as ‘real”-looking as any lion I’ve seen in real life. More real, in a way, since fortunately I have never been that close to a lion before. In Studio Daily the Director, Andrew Adamson, discusses the impact of lion and relates that an earlier version was extremely photorealistic, to the point where people thought it *was* a real lion. He says they decided to make it a more humanized character. An interesting note, they gave Aslan eyelids, which apparently real lions don’t have, to help create more human expressions.
[http://www.studiodaily.com/main/technique/tprojects/5811.html]
So you could see a “making of” DVD show just how Aslan was modeled, jointed, rendered, etc., and, true, you cannot meet them in “real life,” but there remains the experience, the perception of seeing something that one’s brain thinks is real, even if you’re telling it, “no, stupid.”
The willing suspension of disbelieve is nothing new, but this was more like the unwilling suspension of belief, instead of mentally editing out strings and tin foil hat on aliens, one is mentally agog, trying to find fault with the way the fur moved in the wind or the way the animals “interacted” with the human actors. There were faults if you knew where to look, but you really had to concentrate on it, instead of ignoring it.
So, as if for the first time, I was struck by the changes that would take place if real-time photorealistic graphics do become a reality—or should I say when. Even though we might not intellectually mistake computer graphics for reality (although that could happen under the right circumstances), still the perceptual “truth” of these creatures could not be dismissed. To explain this I’ve come up with the idea of a “reality tokens”—things that don’t have currency in the real world, but do have currency in a particular, limited situation.
First, consider dreaming: in a dream, if you see something, it looks real. When you’re dreaming, you are experiencing a perceptually convincing reality. When you wake up, you discount that reality –note the financial metaphor!—because it doesn’t mesh with waking reality. Does that mean dreams are meaningless? No—it just means they aren’t real—or as some philosophies would say, are not part of the same reality that you experience when waking (which may in turn be a dream, there’s no way to tell…). In a similar way, Aslan was real to my daughter. Perceptually, she knew it was a movie, she didn’t think a lion was in the theater, but she thought she was seeing footage of a real lion—and really has had no evidence to the contrary.
Tokens are a constrained form of currency—they have a value that applies in a specific circumstance or event—a subway token, a poker chip… They are particular to the language and needs of subgroup of people, often for a limited time in a prescribed space. They are related to the more widely accepted currency but not identical to it. Some are worth a certain amount of real money, even though they can’t be generally used as money. Sometimes a token’s value is so widely shared among so many people that it can be used instead of real currency. For example, buying a newspaper using a Triboro bridge token in NYC. Of course this isn’t guaranteed to work and wouldn’t work at all outside of Manhattan.
Tokens can also operate completely separately from real currency, as in Monopoly money or its houses and hotels, which only have meaning during an active game of monopoly
Some token-based systems begin to form their own sub-economy and interrelate more tightly with accepted currency. Take frequent flier miles, for example, which can be exchanged, traded and assigned to others. It is money in a way, so long as what you want to buy is a plane flight. Sometimes it’s more general, as in American Express’ “awards” program, where “token” points can be realized as a wide variety of goods and services.
In online gaming, points can be exchanged and there is even a black market in levels and points for gamers who need an edge.
So there is a continuum between “play” tokens and those with highly circumscribed meaning, and tokens that begin to merge with our concept of practical currency. Currency itself, once made of precious metals, then tied them, and now highly abstract, is only meaningful because of societal consensus.
In my daughter’s world, the Narnia movie animals had real currency. To me, they did not, but did have convincing reality within the movie. They were, for me reality tokens—real within their realm. Ever more perceptually realistic computer graphics in many venues are creating other “reality tokens” : real for the moment, real within a given context, real for some people but not for others. These tokens change their value depending on their context, but in some world are a form of valid visual ‘reality” currency.
