The (very, very short) article that inspired this post can be found here:
There is no escape. You
can’t scroll down the News Feed of your social media outlet of choice on any
given day without seeing at least a hundred of them. Well, maybe not as many as one hundred, but
definitely enough to discourage one from counting exactly how many there are
that morning. What could I be talking
about, of course, besides selfies? They’re
everywhere. If you have friends on
social media, any friends at all, there’s bound to be quite a few among them who
like to take pictures of themselves – either with their phone’s front camera,
or with their phone’s rear camera pointed at a mirror – and then post them
online for all of their friends (and some strangers, depending on their privacy
settings) to see. The selfie has become
sort of a symbol in modern culture, to the point where such inventions as the
selfie stick exist; someone decided to sell a pole with a spot at one end that
people can put a camera or smartphone on, just because of the selfie’s wild
popularity. In case you ever wanted to
take a group selfie with a particularly large group of people, and your short
arms wouldn’t let you get the whole group in the frame, then the selfie stick was
the thing you wish you had with you, so you could hold your phone/camera far
enough away from yourself and your friends to get everyone in the shot. And people actually bought it; I mean, after
all, it does make taking group selfies a lot easier, and it makes it easier for
one to make their selfies seem more “artistic” or “surreal” without too much
more effort. Well, who am I to
judge? To each their own, right?
But then I found this article. And the first half of the title explains
everything.
You can now take selfies in Doom.
Or, at least, have the protagonist of Doom take selfies.
For the uninitiated, Doom was one of the earliest video
games in the first-person shooter genre, and a controversial game for its time,
as it was packed to the gills with violence and disturbing imagery inspired by
artistic depictions of hell. Released in
1993, it might not have been the first of its kind, but many argue that it’s
where the FPS genre really found its start.
Since the release of the game’s source code in 1997, countless fans and
programmers have been toying with the game and modifying it, adding or altering
features to either improve the game, or just to make it look different, usually
in a comical way. Very recently, a
modder known as “Linguica” created a Doom mod, which he likes to call “InstaDoom”. What does it do to Doom? It adds 37 photo filters to the game, just
like the kinds of filters you’d see on Instagram, and adds a special viewing
mode featuring a selfie stick, which allows players the rare ability to see
Doom’s protagonist himself. It also
seems that the unnamed protagonist can make funny faces when taking a selfie.
When a mod is created for a game for the main purpose of
allowing selfies and Instagram-style filters, that’s saying something. Visual filters might not be so tough to
program into a game (especially one that’s frequently modded as it is), but the
fact that someone went out of their way to enable the player to take selfies in
an old first-person shooter – flipping the game’s default view so that it’s
facing the opposite direction, while adding in the image of the protagonist holding
a selfie stick – speaks volumes. It’s an
interesting experiment, and it serves as a testament to how deeply the selfie (and visual filters on photos, to a degree) has nested itself into the collective mind of today’s culture…for better or for
worse. Selfies are popular, and probably
aren’t going to lose their popularity anytime soon, but it really is
interesting to see just how popular
selfies have become, that games with public source codes are now being modified
to include taking them as a feature.
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