It made me think of the photographer Robbie Cooper’s Immersion project. He filmed children playing video games. The level of involvement’s similar, but the concentration is something else. I don’t know exactly what that says about video games.

You can see more images on Robbie Cooper’s own website (just click ‘Simulations’ and then ‘Immersion’), and you really should go and watch this video of the players at the New York Times, from which the stills are taken.

More recently he applied the same technique to adults watching pornography, and the result is almost upsetting it’s so personal. I don’t know where you work, but I think they’d probably appreciated if you were at home before watching this 18 minute video of interviews and watching porn-watching.

UPDATE

Serendipity! Suddenly this becomes another instalment of Advertising Will Eat Us All.

About an hour after I posted this I was flicking through the ol’ feed reader and came across this post on the Creative Review Blog about a new Japanese advertising campaign for the slim PS3 called Playface. As with Immersion, they’re filming people as they game.

Take a look at the website, or the advert:

I don’t know if it’s the context or the people they’ve chosen, but it seems stagier.

And someone in the comments to the Creative Review post also points out this photo series by Phillip Toledano (who feels as if the Playface campaign ‘happily ripped me off’):

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