Photo study on kids and video games

Robbie Cooper's compelling portraits of adolescents playing video games, which appeared last November in The New York Times Magazine, are part of an ambitious and unusual project called Immersion. A former photojournalist, Cooper plans to film hundreds of adults and children as they immerse themselves in movies, TV programs and video games.

The point of the project, given the quantity of footage Cooper expects to shoot and the time he is spending, is not just to produce a collection of compelling images. Cooper's mission is artistic and academic, anthropological and philosophical. As he explains, more and more of the human experience is simulated by the screen-born media and messages that surround us. He is interested in how that hyper-reality is constructed: how viewers navigate the ubiquitous media, and use it to shape their own experiences internally.

What makes the study possible—and the images so compelling—is Cooper's camera perspective. He borrows filmmaker Errol Morris's so-called Interrotron technique to record his subjects straight on from the viewpoint of the TV and computer screens that they are watching. He uses the 4K Red One camera, recording ultra high-definition video footage from which he can pull still images.

The images he captures reveal anything but a monotony of passive, catatonic stares that you might expect from engrossed gamers. Instead, the subjects' distinct personalities shine through.

Cooper's project was inspired in part by an experience he had in China. He was wandering around a huge Internet cafe with rows and rows of kids playing virtual video games. He was looking for interesting people to interview, and as he found them, he noticed that they would sit through an entire interview with eyes transfixed to the video screen.

"That got me thinking about their interaction with the screen," Cooper says.

There has been plenty of hand-wringing about the violence in video games and its effect on children who play them. But after watching and thinking about the interactions of kids with video games, Cooper wasn't buying any arguments that video games affect all kids the same way.

"It seems obvious that the person who is responding—your psychological make-up, your character, and your personal circumstances must inform how you perceive anything you're watching," Cooper says. "You're not just a passive consumer of movies or video games. It's a two-way street."

There's now an academic component to Cooper's project that's intended to test the hypothesis. Cooper's curiosity about his subject led him to the academic literature about it. He ended up contacting some university researchers "and it went from there," he says.

Funded by academic grants, he's now working with researchers at the Media Centre in Bournemouth University (UK) on a component of the project called "War and Leisure." Cooper and his assistants plan to document dozens of kids playing war games, and watching war on the news and in movies and documentaries. Researchers will then use Cooper's footage to analyze the facial expressions of the subjects using a facial coding system called FACS.

"The idea is to compare the results [of the FACS analysis] to their psychological profiles," Cooper says. It will take hundreds of hours, and he concedes that "it would be common sense to most people" that personality informs how kids react to what they're watching. "But the details of that seem to be missing from the [academic] literature. The impetus is to turn it into a body of knowledge that people can work with on this particular subject."

In addition to that academic study, Cooper envisions art installations as well, and he's not just videotaping kids as they experience war through video screens. He has started filming adults watching horror movies and comedy. While continuing those efforts, he wants to film people watching TV shopping channels and pornography, and create stills from frame grabs.