Seth Giddings

University of the West of England, Bristol

The study of new media is emerging within diverse academic disciplines. These disciplines often constitute their objects and fields of enquiry quite differently and draw quite different conclusions (or assume quite different consequences) for the changing relationships between digital technology, culture, economies and subjectivities. Despite this apparent heterogeneity however, these emergent disciplines (or sub-disciplines) demonstrate a structural investment in certain key terms and concepts. Of these terms ‘cyberspace’ is perhaps the most persistent.

It is taken to refer variously to the different Internet media (the web, email, chat, etc.) either separately or collectively, to simulations, to virtual reality applications, to computer-mediated communication in general or to specific communicative forms such as MUDs and MOOs. Often actual media technologies and their patterns of use are discussed through reference to literary and cinematic representations of cyberspace. The status of these ‘old’ media texts and images as evidence is ambiguous – often cyberspace is posited as virtual in the specific sense of the word: real, but yet to be realised. Cyberspace is always almost about to open up to us. The temporal, technological and spatial boundaries to cyberspace are as varied as its discourses. Cyberspace (and to an extent VR) then is either an ideal realm, glimpsed in fiction, university research labs, communicative networks and art galleries, or a space that is opening up to the young, a space beyond the knowledge or even biology and psychology of a particular generation of academics. It is defined as other to the everyday world and its established media forms and patterns of consumption and communication. This otherness may be the ideal virtual world into which we can escape, the new communication media that threaten the established one-to-many model of the broadcast media, or identity workshops in which markers of class, race and gender are ‘left behind’ in free-floating bliss. Or, conversely, this is all ideological, an Imaginary in which technologies themselves are presented as floating free of material constraints and power structures.

Until recently all of these discourses mapped out their cyberspaces with little reference, or often – in opposition to, the first and most popular computer medium: the computer or video game. Yet, computer games were instrumental in the development of realtime interactive computing, they popularised and made accessible computer technology. In certain highly significant ways they are cyberspace – William Gibson famously got the idea for his cyberspace from watching children playing in an arcade – they have, over the three decades since they entered the living room, generated genuinely new forms of narrative, spatial and interactive media. This paper will argue that not only is the marginalisation or ignorance of video games an oversight that needs rectifying (we are all here to do that!), but that the analysis of games as playing with computers and computer texts is essential to understand cyberspace and hence new media in general.

There are two important points to make at this stage: the first is to assert that cyberspace is not ‘Virtual Reality’ in the sense of an autonomous world or universe, post-symbolic, post media. We don’t enter the computer or computer networks as the protagonists of Tron and Neuromancer do. Our bodies are not left behind and, whatever else cyberspace may be, ‘entering’ it is still a media (and hence mediated) experience.

The second is that whilst the cyberspace of computer and videogames remains a media experience, it is, on significant levels, a genuinely new form of media experience. Debunking cyberspace or virtual reality as illusory threatens to overlook this.

How might we start to conceptualise and analyse cyberspace as a popular computer media form? I will start with the fact that game cyberspace is not so much a pre-existing world or environment, but rather it is created or realised by the player in the act or dynamics of play.

The ideas of Michel de Certeau regarding the city as a textual space ‘read’ by its citizens as they walk its streets and squares are frequently used to think about the exploration of cyberspace as active and meaningful. His assertion that space is practiced place, that neutral space is animated and made meaningful through its traversal, that an understanding of space through ‘spatial practices’ - active physical and epistemological navigation, is extremely suggestive.

These notions are productive in thinking about the peculiar temporality of videogames. Simulated spaces in games are never just spaces to be explored – there is always some narrative or thematic structure to the player’s exploration

In this map of a level of Tomb Raider for example, the architecture and the game’s dynamic are inseparable. The level is at once a space to be explored and a chapter to be read. Again de Certeau’s schema is useful in pinpointing the dynamism of relationships between the understanding of space, time and reading:

Reading a ‘walkthrough’ of Tomb Raider demonstrates the game’s formal similarity to the itinerary, as least on one level. Can we talk of ‘cyberspatial practices’ then? I would argue that this line of enquiry only takes us so far. Perhaps an analogy with a theme park rather than the city might be more accurate. That is, we may make our own story as we wander through cyberspace, but with within certain limits. Cyberspace is imagineered. The space is controlled, written, coded more completely than any urban planning. Moreover, cyberspace in games can be thought of as ‘gameworlds’ for it is not just the architecture and landscapes, but the physical laws of gravity and motion that are coded.

In video games then we are both mapping gameworlds and playing with textual or media representations (or simulations – a distinction I will return to). The following extract from a study of video game console play highlights the multilayered levels of engagement with cyberspace as textual gameplay, of which engagement with a simulated space is only one:

So, if cyberspace is not really space as such, but a kind of (interaction with) a map or itinerary, are we then playing with texts? On a certain level we are, however I would like to question the usefulness of metaphors of text and reading in relation to computer media - in either the everyday sense of the written or printed word or in Roland Barthes’ sense of culture as textual and hence readable. I would argue that whilst the notion of text is productive as a conceptual starting point, it too has its limitations as an accurate framework for conceptualising interactive media such as games.

To begin to propose a more productive framework it will be necessary to identify and highlight key specificities of the video or computer game, i.e. their existence as computer media, and the concomitant interactive engagement of their players.

The videogame’s conventions and modes of play are inseparable from its status as computer media. Playing a videogame requires an understanding of, even a decoding of, its structure or system. This system (of levels, of architectural organisation, of points, timing of events, of non-player characters’ ‘AI’, etc.) is itself of course a highly complex semiotic system, which could feasibly be thought of as radically independent from the particular set of images or scenarios texture-mapped over it. For example, the Doom engine has been used as the basis for a number of quite different interactive environments.

[at this point in the presentation a Java applet of Game of Life is demonstrated]

Game of Life and Evil Alien are both computer programs and as such have been ‘written’. Thinking of them as textual serves to remind us that these are still cultural products despite the sense they generate of alternative worlds or artificial life. However, each (as are all computer games) is based in a mathematical set of parameters with which the player intervenes and responds. These gameworlds may be more productively conceptualised as algorithmic rather than textual or even spatial.

This distinction is highly significant and an implicit understanding of it is essential to play many, if not all, games. For example: watch someone who is unfamiliar with simulation games playing The Sims for the first time. Building houses and naming characters is straightforward enough, but as the family goes about its daily artificial life the tendency is to treat the characters as if they were real people and try to intervene accordingly. The game’s dynamics are driven by algorithms which rarely map directly onto any sense of actual human behaviour.

As with the Nintendo kids already discussed we see an engagement with computer generated worlds that requires an implicit awareness of layers of meaning. Players must engage with the game as a relationship between the environment and characters and the underlying mathematical parameters and algorithms of the simulation.

Ted Friedman’s analyses of simulation games are very useful in conceptualising the specificities of games as computer-based media and as play with computers. He asks what kind of identification or immersion are we experiencing when we play simulation games. Referring to games such as SimCity, he argues

So far, then – I have argued that the popular notion of cyberspace as space within a computer or computer networks - as borrowed from popular fiction - is resonant but limiting. The sense of interacting in and with a space whilst playing a game is often palpable, though it is only part of a series of layers of interactive processes and engagement. Moreover I would argue that the cybercultural concept of cyberspace (from its wholesale and largely unreflexive borrowings from Gibson to its dreams of transcendence and cyborg subjectivities) is in fact a sublimation of the real, day to day, popular development and experience of computer-generated spatial representations – and players’ relationships with them - manifested in video game play.

It is important then to assert the distinction between fictional and actual cyberspace (whilst acknowledging their mutually interdependent development, aesthetic and experience).

These categories are not mutually exclusive and they overlap substantially, but for now I want to focus on the overlap between video games and simulations.

Within cybercultural theory ‘simulation’ is usually taken in the sense developed by Baudrillard – as simulacra.

Marc Prensky offers three definitions of simulation:

For the purposes of this paper I would like to address Prensky’s third definition - simulations as material technologies and media - but bear in mind the Baudrillardian sense, reflecting on the notion of simulation as productive of reality, not ‘counterfeit’ nor necessarily approximating the real world. Prensky’s emphasis on the temporal nature of simulations is also salient for this discussion. He cites Will Wright (the creator of SimCity, The Sims, and numerous other simulation games) discussing simulations as models quite different from, for example, balsa wood models. The simulation is temporal, modelling processes such as decay, growth, population shifts, not physical structures.

To this we can add Ted Friedman’s concern for the position of the player in the generation of simulated worlds and their processes:

So simulation in a videogame could be analysed thus:

1. productive of reality – So in Doom or Tomb Raider, the game is representational on one level – walls, human figures, slime – part of the universe of popular media culture, but the experience of playing the game is one of interacting with a profoundly different kind of environment. These maps are not maps of any territory, but interfaces to a database and the algorithms of the computer simulation;

b. this ‘reality’ then is mathematically structured and determined. As Prensky points out, The Sims adds a fun interface to a cultural form rooted in science and the mathematical and traditionally presented only as numbers on the screen. ‘Games such as SimCity incorporate a variety of ways of modeling dynamic systems – including linear equations (e.g. spreadsheets), differential equations (system dynamic – based simulations) and cellular automata – where the behaviours of certain objects come from their own properties and rules for how those properties interacted with neighbors’;

c. thinking of videogames as simulations also returns us to the assertion that the player’s experience of cyberspace is one not only of exploration but of realising or bringing the gameworld into being in a semiotic and cybernetic circuit.

This raises the question of the relationship between a non-game simulation and the processes it models. This goes beyond the remit of this paper, but is a fascinating question. It is generally assumed that non-entertainment simulations achieve some level of mimetic effectiveness, or they wouldn’t be produced and used. However – again perhaps we are using the model of ‘representation’ inaccurately here. Flight simulators don’t so much simulate the complexities of flight or the aerial environment at 30 thousand feet as the activity of using the aeroplane’s ‘interface’. They mechanically simulate the use of a different machine. Economic simulations are widely used yet appear more effective as ways of generating a range of possible outcomes and eventualities than predicting actual economic downturns and crashes. Could we say then that the computer simulation is therefore not so much a copy without an original as a model or process without a referent, the itinerary rotting over space-time?

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