Like Moths to a Flame

A futuristic metropolis at night. A drone is taking flight through the city. In one fell swoop, the flying object moves from the top of the skyscrapers through the cityscape and down to the asphalt. At first, we don’t know what kind of drone it is; what its mission could be; in which city this flight takes place; nor who is steering this drone, if anyone. We only know what to look for. “Neon Noir”, a computer graphics technology demonstration (tech demo), tells us at the very beginning: “Real-Time Ray-Traced Reflections.” This prompt prevents any uncertainty of intent or communication. We are asked to look out for and admire lights, specifically the light reflections presented in this big, swooping gesture. The future, according to “Neon Noir”, is shiny and bright. Like any tech demo, “Neon Noir” participates and intervenes in cultural negotiations of what is deemed worthy of emotional and financial investment. ‘Demonstration’ is almost too narrow a term, since tech demos don’t just present what will be technologically possible in the (near) future, but also presuppose and designate what is (and will have been) desirable.¹Christoph Ernst and Jens Schröter, “Die Zukunft vorstellen. Technologie-Demonstrationen in der Geschichte digitaler Medien,” Technikgeschichte 88, no. 1 (2021), 84.

Video 1: Smooth flight and light conditions in “Neon Noir,” a Cryengine tech demo showcasing ray-tracing technology. Cryengine, “Neon Noir: Real-Time Ray Traced Reflections – Achieved with Cryengine,” YouTube, March 15, 2019.

Computer game graphics are obsessed with light. For several years, research, development, and demonstrations have been focusing on spectacles of light that are meant to dazzle and awe viewers with flickering flames, flying sparks, bursting explosions, glittering ripples of water, and glossy surfaces. Graphics tech demos showcasing software architectures for game development (so-called game engines) know multiple possible addressees: 1) players, i. e. prospective consumers of games developed with the software demonstrated; 2) investors interested in future revenue generation; and 3) licensees, i. e. individuals or companies licensing software packages for their own uses, such as game development studios, architectural firms, urban and product designers, and government and military institutions. Keen on projecting bright technological futures, the computer game industry seems to imagine and address their audience akin to moths drawn to flames: always and straightforwardly attracted to the shiniest lights.

Graphics demos aren’t exclusively a matter of aesthetics.²Stefan Werning, Making Games: The Politics and Poetics of Game Creation Tools (MIT Press, 2021), 6–16 and passim. In their formation of future expectations and desires, their visual regimes also shape ways of thinking and producing knowledge about the medium. Consider, for instance, the working logics of ray-tracing. Ray-tracing is a complicated mathematical operation used to simulate the behavior of light emitted by different sources in its interaction with objects (shadows, reflections, refraction, etc.). As a technology for simulating direct and indirect illumination it can only work because of its claim to universality, and because it imagines light as linear and stably traceable rays.³Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines (Routledge, 2015), 94–100. “And if the lines along which light travels are straight, then so are the ways of enlightenment,”⁴Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (Routledge, 2007), 153. or, in other words: what we come to know about and expect of a medium. Ray-tracing functions through an epistemic regime straightening the relations among light, surfaces, colors, and environments. 

Although “Neon Noir” borrows from the visual repertoires of film noir and cyberpunk, it retains almost none of the anxieties about urbanity and moral, social, or economic environments typically present in works of both genres (however doubtful their capacities for political interrogation may ultimately be). In this sense, “Neon Noir” isn’t really about the city or the drone. It is about the “shiny computer game utopias of transcendence,” about fantasies that, while claiming universality, are in fact culturally specific.⁵Kerim Doğruel, “Glänzende Zukünfte—Kristalline Versprechen des Computerspiels,” in Science MashUp: XR—Gesellschaft—Utopien, ed. Gabriele Hoffacker and Benjamin Bigl (Springer VS, 2022), 64. My translation. “The hegemony of the straight line is a phenomenon of modernity, not of culture in general.”⁶Ingold, Lines, 155. These images, then, belong to a general fetishism of mainstream gaming technology. They also showcase an ardent belief in the kind of unproblematic, “smooth history”⁷Clara Podlesnigg, Holograms and Their Promises (dissertation, Philipps-Universität Marburg, 2024), 14–16. that finds its visual articulation in showing off a polished, futuristic drone on a smooth flight through a shiny, futuristic metropolis while following the well-worn visual tracks of cyberpunk and film noir (most notably, of course, Blade Runner [1982]). Yet, the drone and the city make up the scene that renders the shine plausible in the first place. Any claimed universality needs a specific situation to express itself as such. Despite its conventionality, then, I am interested in the specifics of this case. How might we—players, but also scholars of media and culture—want to participate and intervene in these matters of negotiation? Shine is situationally and locally dependent. “To perceive shine, all three [a light source, an object, and the perceiving eye; L.L.] have to be in a certain constellation. Following this argument, shine appears and disappears in relation to these changing positions.”⁸Antje Krause-Wahl, Petra Löffler, and Änne Söll 2021, “Introduction,” in Materials, Practices and Politics of Shine in Modern Art and Popular Culture, ed. Antje Krause-Wahl, Petra Löffler and Änne Söll (Bloomsbury, 2021), 2. I do think the gloss and shine of these images don’t just presuppose, but also implicate our desires. Or my desires; I will rather speak for myself. How can we, how can I deal with these images?

Changing Positions

At first glance, “Neon Noir” invites a reading that follows its central optical metaphor: reflection. “Neon Noir follows the journey of a police drone investigating a crime scene. As a drone descends into the streets of a futuristic city, illuminated by neon lights, its reflection is accurately displayed in the windows it passes. The drone model also has self-reflecting properties on various surfaces, such as its wings. Further demonstrating how ray tracing can deliver a lifelike environment, neon lights are reflected in the puddles below them, street lights flicker on wet surfaces, and windows reflect the scene opposite them accurately.”⁹“Crytek Releases Free Ray Tracing Benchmark ‘Neon Noir’,” Crytek, November 13, 2019,  https://www.crytek.com/news/crytek-releases-free-ray-tracing-benchmark-neon-noir. My emphases. Hence, should I simply interpret and critique this demo staging a police drone with “self-reflecting properties” as reflective of the gaming industry’s entanglement with the military entertainment complex and technologies of policing and surveillance? Call these reflections problematic, and leave it at that? Or wouldn’t that be a similarly straightforward reading looking the other way from the desires implicated in it, which is to say, repeating the reflection without disturbing it?¹⁰“Diffraction does not produce ‘the same’ displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear,” Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler (Routledge, 1992), 300. See also Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007), 71–94.

The shiny surfaces of the video’s drone and urban façades remind me of another mode of encountering technological ‘newness’:¹¹“[W]hen a new medium is introduced its meaning—its potential, its limitations, the publicly agreed upon sense of what it does, and for whom—has not yet been pinned down. And part of the lure of a new medium for any community is surely this uncertain status. […] In other words, emergent media may be seen as instances of both risk and potential,” Geoffrey B. Pingree and Lisa Gitelman, “Introduction: What’s New About New Media?” in New Media, 1740–1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (MIT Press), xv. peeling off the protective foil of newly acquired devices. This can be a moment of satisfaction and excitement. Satisfaction from a peel that is haptically and/or acoustically pleasing: the many ASMR-style videos showing hands peeling off protective foils with abundant care and slow, continuous movements — as opposed to fidgeting fingers — are indicative. Excitement about a moment, however benign, that marks a new beginning: a new relation to a new object, or at least an updated relation to an updated object, the gradual adoption of or adaptation to new habits in daily encounters. Peeling off the foil is an action of taking ownership, but it’s also a point of departure from which the contours of habit emerge. There is a dance of small, both pleasurable and annoying adjustments and alignments, re-adjustments and re-alignments, performed around new and shiny objects for as long as it takes to stabilize a routine.

Yet, removing the foil can be anxiety-inducing. The very moment of the satisfying, exciting peeling exposes the responsibility of care for the object (don’t drop it, don’t break it, don’t scratch it; at least not yet). Any shiny surface will only stay shiny for so long. The textures of smooth, dry surfaces, and rough, dull or sticky dirt, will eventually mix. Newness wears off very quickly. (Note as well the operation of adding a different protective foil: you must ensure no speck of dust sits on the screen, or else the protective foil will all but emphasize its unpleasing presence). Effortlessly enduring shine is a fantasy of glamour: ultimately unattainable, but then again, attainability might not be the point. At the precise moment I peel off the protective foil, I guarantee my own inconvenience and enter into the mildly frustrating, but also boring rhythm of dirtying and cleaning. Lauren Berlant writes, “Insofar as we are affected—by the world, by people, by language, by things—we are disorganized; insofar as we take in the impact of encounters with the world, we wobble, surprised, ceaselessly adjusting.”¹²Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People (Duke University Press, 2022), 38. Satisfaction and excitement are unobtainable without accepting an adaptation to rhythms of disturbance. In addition, shiny surfaces themselves can be annoying; just think of the glare of a shiny laptop screen in the sun.

I recently bedazzled my office keycard with shiny, sparkly, pink gemstone stickers. Instead of peeling off a foil, in this instance I added another layer. It somehow made the card’s surface more “surfacy”, which is to say, more expressive of itself and more likely to be perceived as a surface, not just a functional object. Here, as well, movement is key: as I sometimes take a moment to tilt and turn the card, the effects of shine and sparkle vary according to the prevailing conditions of light. With the stickers, I reoriented my relation to the card, playfully (mis-)appropriating it by adding a layer of silly, fun novelty to the mundane, work-related keycard. On its small scale, this appropriation deneutralizes a keycard whose nondescript surface enables interchangeability and transfer between workers.¹³Krause-Wahl, Löffler and Söll, “Introduction,” 13–14.

All of this speaks to the situational contingency of shine, and to ambivalent encounters that could look like a desire for something and simultaneous uncertainty about the same thing¹⁴“In ambivalence, we want and we don’t want what we want. Or we want parts but not wholes and resent the added freight. Or we’re averse to what we’re attached to but can perform neither a reconciliation nor a cleavage,” Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, 36.—perhaps something like make-believe or play. I aim to accentuate relations mediated through and with shine that are slightly more complex, unstable, and oriented differently than the straightforward desire which “Neon Noir” and similar demos presuppose. Specificity is key for such an approach. This raises the question: which perspective does “Neon Noir” suggest to viewers?

“Neon Noir” is a recording of a real-time rendering designed and published by Crytek, a German game development company, in order to showcase the capabilities of its proprietary Cryengine. Besides developing games, Crytek’s bread and butter is in programming, servicing, and licensing the Cryengine. Game engines are used to reduce the complexities of game development by providing a pre-existing scaffolding of various design functions. Among Crytek’s previous licensees are Amazon, who used it as a basis to develop their own engine, Amazon Lumberyard; and US Military subcontractors, who have used the Cryengine to develop prototypes and training simulations.¹⁵As of the time of writing, the only business partners Crytek publically discloses on its website are commercial game studios and independent developers. Historically, the company has also listed arms manufacturers and military technologies providers such as Lockheed Martin, ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems, Cubic, and Meggitt among its “Disclosed Serious Games Licensees,” Crytek, archived August 22, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20110925032939/http://mycryengine.com/index.php?conid=11. Largely thanks to the computationally expensive game graphics afforded by the Cryengine infrastructure, Crytek is one of the few German game development companies who are able to claim a position of global technological leadership.

Addressing prospective players, the demo asks us not just to look at the drone, but also to identify with the drone’s perspective. The flight starts as a movement from a first-person perspective. Only later does the drone itself become visible. We are deliberately asked to imagine what it would be like to steer this drone and explore the illuminated, shiny city for ourselves. Arriving at the pile of bullet shells, the sequence immediately calls to mind a typical computer game quest structure (item prompts a scene; find the culprit, solve the crime, receive a reward). Bundled up with the idea of universal knowledge and control of light is the idea of an all-encompassing, disembodied, and neutral perspective. The person controlling the drone is absent from the scene. The demo stages a “god trick and all its dazzling—and therefore, blinding—illuminations,”¹⁶Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, No. 3 (1988), 584. a god trick of limitless vision.¹⁷“The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit. […] Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all seems not just mythically about the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice,” Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581. This trick is meant to impress and hence attract us; it is a fantasy of omnipotence. “A two-fold overpowering is supposed to occur in computer game worlds’ moments of sublimity, once on the level of the image […] and again on the level of technology. […] These are sublimities centered around technology that attempt to disregard any moments of irritation or, indeed, reflection.”¹⁸Doğruel, “Glänzende Zukünfte”, 68. My translation. In “Neon Noir”, it is precisely the reflections and shine that strive to produce this kind of affect of technological grandeur and transcendence. All gloss, no friction. I am instead interested in a relation that isn’t so streamlined or sure of itself, that falters and flutters. Let’s return to the animal I started out with: the moth.

Looking up why flames are even appealing to moths, I learned that moths aren’t really attracted to light but rather disoriented by light.¹⁹Samuel T. Fabian et al., “Why Flying Insects Gather at Artificial Light,” Nature Communications 15 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-44785-3. To humans, artificial lights are a cultural technique that enables oriented, enticing life (including the views produced by drone flights) even when it is dark. The encounter with a faltering moth in artificially lit darkness is an experience of difference (what are you doing?!). However, it seems like moths orient their dorsal side towards artificial light sources instead of the sky; in other words, such lights cause a physical confusion of which way is up and down. Their adjustments relative to gravity become confounded,²⁰Ibid., 3. resulting in erratic, vertiginous movements. Urban lightscapes are a regular site of this kind of confusion. Coming to scientific grips with this nonsensical-to-humans behavior, complex media technological experimental setups including “insect scale motion capture”²¹Ibid., 2. and high-speed videography²²Ibid., 10–12. produce similarly vertiginous images.

Instead of one big, swooping and smooth motion peeling off the foil of a shiny city, this image confronts us with paths of flight that are anything but linear, easy to follow, or even directional. “Thus displayed one could not get over the strangeness of it.”²³Virginia Woolf, “The Death of the Moth”, in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942), 4. In no sense do I argue for an equation of us and the moths (e. g., we are like moths, our natural orientations confused by the dazzling lights of the video game industry) — this would be a comparison repeating the initial universalizing impetus. Instead, I wonder if their disorientation, experimentally visualized in an image of vertiginous movement, could be a helpful prompt towards particularity. “There is no unmediated photograph or passive camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies and machines; there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds.”²⁴Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 583. Attaching an “insect-scale” mo-cap rig to a moth turns its dorsal side into a surface observable on human scales of visualization through the capture of light’s reflections. The terms of participation in this experiment to observe and demonstrate light effects aren’t wholly unidirectional either. “During these [motion capture] recordings, the insect was free to leave the cameras’ view, and then return.”²⁵Fabian et al., “Why Flying Insects Gather at Artificial Light,” 11. One epistemology uses high tech set-ups to universalize, and the predictable happens. The other tailors even higher tech set-ups (500fps²⁶Ibid., 10. ) to insect-scale questions, and human-scale perspectives change. One stages light effects in a straightforward quest for efficiency and closure. The other produces traces of light that prohibit streamlined focus and instead make my eyes flutter and play with the image.

Laura Laabs

Laura Laabs is a research fellow at the Offenbach University of Art and Design. Previously, she was a member of the research training program “Configurations of Film” at Goethe University, Frankfurt. She is interested in the kinds of order produced through games and writing about (playing) games. This research interest extends to her dissertation on bodily and cultural techniques and computer games. Recently published: “Ziptease,” In Progress. A GEM Lab Periodical of New Research, https://www.globalemergentmedia.com/in-progress/ziptease; and “Grundlagen der Pokémonologie,” in: Thomas Spies/Şeyda Kurt/Holger Pötzsch (Hg.), Spiel*Kritik. Kritische Perspektiven auf Videospiele im Kapitalismus, doi.org/10.14361/9783839467978-016.