Semi-automatic offside, augmented truth and CGI replays are part of this World Cup day experience
The camera slowly zooms in on Lionel Messi’s face. And it helps to keep the zoom.
Soon, Messi’s shoulders are no longer visible. Then his neck disappears, then his chin. The camera continues to zoom. That’s moments before Argentina and Mexico are about to faint in Lusail and the world’s biggest player is subjected to a nasal swab photograph.
Of course, a lot of strange things happened in this World Cup, but it turns out to be a more sophisticated progression, a change of tone and a low-key aesthetic. You can see it in TV coverage, with its deep concentrates and swooping aerial shots, a product whose reach and flavor are increasingly cinematic. This process, to some extent, has been going on for some time. But perhaps the unexpected maximum progression is how the virtual global is also beginning to bleed in the living of the experience.
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For most of the last century, football has necessarily existed as two parallel games. There is the game of tickets and stadiums and grass and physical seating, a world that can only be seen, heard, smelled and touched.
Then the game that came here filtered through a screen, a world of buttons and pixels, mediated by commentators and TV producers, music themes and editing. Qatar 2022 is perhaps the first World Cup where the department between those two globals is no longer clear. .
You can feel it from the moment you climb the steps and emerge into the arena, which in this tournament gives less of the impression of entering a sporting position than radiating through a portal. Loud and catchy music fills each and every area and hole. The melodies stop a few moments before the attack begins and begin a moment after the whistle. On the giant screens, cryptocurrency trading classified ads vie for attention with the resounding rumble of the official announcer at the edge of the field. , babbling like a circus leader.
In the stands, one knows vaguely that there are thousands of enthusiasts singing and swinging around you and yet your unauthorized noise is almost invariably drowned out by the officially authorized noise coming out of the speakers. From time to time, the announcer warn and invite enthusiasts to “make some noise”. Which, in all honesty, is what they’ve been doing all along. But in Qatar 2022, it doesn’t matter how much you are or how much noise you make. Speak when they talk to you.
Even when the actual game begins, the virtual global still manages to leak out. You’re probably familiar with the ghostly, incorporeal virtual mannequins of semi-automatic offside technology. But for stadium spectators, it’s just one component of a relentless computer: generated cyclorama that takes position on giant screens. Animated graphics are interposed every few seconds with live statistics (line breaks, contested possession, direction of attack). Later in the game, the screens show replays of past incidents rendered, for some Explanation of Why: In CGI, so you can see a virtual avatar of Raheem Sterling crossing a virtual avatar of Harry Kane, even if you saw the real thing about five minutes earlier.
All this, of course, if you just decide to watch the game through your old eyes. However, it opens the Fifa app and a whole new landscape is presented. Using its augmented truth mask, you can point your phone at the box and watch it turn into a heat map, overlay live stats on the lawn, watch the same slow-motion replays broadcast to the audience at home. Which is, from a technological standpoint, incredibly impressive. But it raises a basic question: if long-term football is watching a live match on your phone screen, then what’s the exact point of being there?There is, of course, an “old man screaming to the cloud” detail in all this.
Undoubtedly, this direct/digital hybrid is probably aimed at the youngest in the market: the generation that grew up eating much of their football not in stadiums or on television, but through video game consoles, and in recent years through online games like Fifa Ultimate Team. And really, what we’re seeing is not so much the fusion of the stadium experience with the TV experience, but the fusion of both in the gaming experience, with its rejuvenating soundtrack, intuitive haptics and cinematic visual effects. , its perpetual displacement of knowledge and graphics. Wherever you are, no matter how you look, football seems like a fixed product while providing the ghost of perpetual user control.
This is the first Web3 World Cup and Qatar is, in many tactics, the ultimate control tube for this bold experience: the metaverse as a country, a haunting layer-over-layer world, where you’re never sure what’s genuine and what’s virtual. . or if it even makes sense to distinguish between the two. Sometimes you walk down the street and feel a sudden breath of bloodless air, without a grill or a fan to give you an idea of its origin. At the Villaggio grocery shopping mall in Doha, a gondolier will show you his reproduction of Venice’s canal system. Official attendance at many World Cup matches has exceeded the official capacity of the stadium.
Everything is real. Nothing is real. If what we are seeing is more organized, how much can we accept as true with what we are seeing?Is it still a sport, or just an entertainment product cleverly presented as a sport?These are questions with no definitive answers. After all, it’s your game and you can play it however you want.