Playing
With Theory: videogames,
the technological imaginary and a new media studies Seth Giddings
paper as part of panel Playful Futures: game cultures and a new
media studies (Jon Dovey, Helen Kennedy, Seth Giddings) Playing With The Future: Development and
Directions in Computer Gaming Conference University of Manchester 5-7th
April 2002 TITLE SLIDE: Playing With Theory: videogames,
the technological imaginary and a New Media Studies
Towards the completion
of our book, New Media: A Critical Introduction, we were faced with
the problem of how to conclude a wide ranging and theoretically eclectic
text. One more-or-less serious suggestion was that we write a collective 'Manifesto for New Media Studies'. If we had
pursued this idea what follows might well have been my manifesto demand.
SLIDE Video Games Must Be Central to New
Media Studies
This paper's
argument is premised on two observations. Neither should prove too controversial
at a conference on computer games.
The first is
that computer and video games have been marginalised or trivialised
by the various theoretical discourses addressing computer-based media,
discourses that may now be seen as constituting a 'New Media Studies'.
This discourses include Computer-Mediated Communication, Cultural and
Media Studies and Cyberculture.
The second observation
is that, contrary to this marginalisation, the video game is in fact
a crucial historical factor in the development of computer media.
The game Spacewar
is a useful example - designed and played by the pioneering computer
students at MIT in the early 1960s, it is widely recognised as not only
the first computer game, but also a key milestone in the development
of interactive computer use, and hence in personal, popular computer
media as we understand them today.
SLIDE: 'Ready or not, computers are coming
to the people. That's good news, maybe the best since psychedelics'.
Stewart Brand, on watching Spacewar at the Stanford AI Lab in the early
1970s (quoted in Ceruzzi, 1999: 64)
Alluquere Roseanne
Stone's book The War of Technology and Desire at the Close of the Mechanical
Age is a key text in the study of Cyberculture. For her, Spacewar marks
a paradigm shift in the development of computing - from computers as
tools to computers as arenas for social experience. As interactive computer
media Spacewar promised new kinds of media experience - dialogues or
conversations with and through computer networks, or even a new public
theatre. This conception of the possibilities of computer media resonates
through Cyberculture and Computer-Mediated Communication discourses.
However, the
enthusiasm for Spacewar's paradigmatic status is tempered by its status
as a game - and a shoot-'em-up
game at that. Spacewar serves as a salient example of the
discursive ambivalence which surrounds computer and video games.
For Stone, whilst this particular computer game indicates the beginning
of the virtual age, it simultanesously carries the seeds of this virtual
age's possible destruction. As a shoot-'em-up game drawing on popular
science fiction to animate simple graphics and physics with a cartoon
violence rather than any narrative or communicative experience, it offers
'no particular redeeming virtue...'. For Stone Spacewar's lineage -
popular videogames - hold 'all the thrill [...] of chopping up Abel
Gance's Napoleon to insert commercials for TV viewing'. Stone: 26
I want to argue
that this ambivalence towards, or anxiety over, the commercial computer
or video game within theories of new media is not oversight or incidental,
but structural - symptomatic even.
Video games should
be studied as new media then, not only for their own historical and
developmental significance, but also - for the analytical and critical
purchase they offer
·
firstly for the study of new media technologies and texts more
generally, and secondly,
·
the theoretical discourses that take new media as their object
of study.
To explore material
and discursive agency of games as computer media, I will address the
much-mentioned - but rarely defined - term, the technological imaginary.
SLIDE The Technological Imaginary and
our quote below...
The notion of
the 'Imaginary' originates in psychoanalytical theory and has migrated
to the study of culture and technology via film theory. On its most
general level the technological imaginary refers to a notion of a popular
or collective imagination about technologies. It does not mean 'fantasy'
or 'illusion' in any straightforward way, but rather
'a realm of images,
representations, ideas and intuitions of fulfillment, of wholeness and
completeness that human beings, in their fragmented and incomplete selves,
desire to become'. (Lister et
al, 2002)
SLIDE 50s ideal home CAPTION: AN EARLIER
MOMENT OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL IMAGINARY: ANOTHER SOON-TO-BE-REALISED UTOPIA
Technologies
or a technologised future, are cast in the role of an ideal other -
manifesting all that is whole and complete, and superceding all that
is imperfect and unsatisfactory in the contemporary world. SLIDE: Telewest
cyberspace
Kevin Robins
has mounted a sustained critical assault on certain cyberculture discourses
as precisely such a technological imaginary.
Examining theories
of cyberspace and virtual reality as realms alternative, autonomous
realms to the real world OR as ideal spaces for disembodied communication,
he concludes that this Imaginary is ideological, a diversion from, or
masking of, the real world and its material problems and conflicts.
Dreams of virtual reality and virtual community in the early 1990s,
he argues, released themselves from consideration of the real world
of power structures, historical and social change, economics and politics.
Privileging instead notions of new online public spheres, characterised
by immateriality, disembodiment, progressive identity politics, and
an absence of commercial or governmental influence.
'What is psychically
compelling about [these technologies - and the 'cyberspace vision']
is their capacity to provide a certain security and protection against
the frightful world and against the fear that inhabits our bodies. They
provide the means to distance and detach ourselves from what is fear
provoking in the world and in ourselves'. Robins 1996: 12
Again it is important
to stress that the technological imaginary is not mere illusion. For
Robins the cyberspace imaginary has ramifications for how we understand
and develop technologies and how we address them politically. Taking
this further we might argue that the imaginary in this sense though
intangible, is real - it has real effects - it informs and inflects
technological research, consumer expectations, and government policies.
If we return
to Spacewar, the workings of the Imaginary become clear: the ideal and
utopian aspects of computer media are established as a new virtual realm,
divided off from (and set in opposition to) other aspects - notably
the violent content, the ostensibly trivial pleasures of computer game
play, and of course Spacewar's numerous and highly successful commercial
progeny, from shoot-'em-ups to the diversity of the videogame as it
is played today.
This repression
leads to a profound misunderstanding of both the historical development
of new media technologies and texts, and of the discursive and symbolic
construction of cyberspace itself.
SLIDE: Neuromancer sequence
Famously, William
Gibson got his idea for a fictional cyberspace watching children immersed
in playing video games in an arcade. This is not an insignificant anecdote.
I would argue that in important ways, cyberspace - as an idea and as
a set of images - originates in videogames and has been developed and
sustained through the popular, everyday consumption of games and related
popular texts.
SLIDE: Tron grid sequence
For example,
at around the same time that Neuromancer was published, the Disney film
Tron visualised a sophisticated world simulated within a computer. The
two texts bear some comparison. The glowing grids and geometries of
both Gibson's cyberspace and Tron's computer space are inspired by arcade
graphics of the late 70s. The premise of each - that computer users
are locked so closely into cybernetic feedback loops with computer technology
that computer space is actually entered - is inspired by the anxious
yet exhilarating experience of losing oneself in a computer game, of
losing any absolute sense of where the player ends and the technology
begins. Both texts dramatise this immersion as a dangerous adventure,
Tron, moreover, presents a cyberspace that is fundamentally ludic.
SLIDE: Tron game sequence Throughout the
development and popularisation of computer-based media, aspects of this
cyberspace imaginary has operated as a framework for the development
of actual VR or networked applications, as well as academic theories.
New media have been conceptualised, dramatised and aestheticised by
the video game.
We begin to see
then that utopian cyberculture establishment of a fictive or ideological
virtual world, is effected through the discursive splitting off from
'cyberspace' an Imaginary transcendent
realm of the new and fluid, repressing its material existence and development
as popular commercial new media.
Talk of the repressed
would suggest we return to the psychoanalytical origins of the Imaginary
as a concept.
In psychoanalytical
terms, the Imaginary is founded in self-loss, lack, or alienation. In
Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, for example, the infant subject
has a profoundly ambivalent relationship to an imaginary image (in this
case its own reflection): it loves the coherence of identity and body
the image offers, but hates it precisely because it is separate from
the subject.
SLIDE: 'This radical oscillation between
contrary emotions in respect to the same object characterises all of
the relationships of the imaginary order' Silverman 1983: 158
Claudia Springer
has applied such ideas to the study of cyberpunk literature, films and
comics. She reads images of cyborgs and cybernetics in precisely these
terms: the Imaginary as ambivalent and contradictory. In these popular
narratives, dreams of transcending the body and identity are set against
the embodied nature of eroticism and gender divisions. They are shot
through with a fascination for, and revulsion against, both the body
and technology.
So - to follow
through this analogy with psychoanalytical theory, if the coherence
and autonomy of the cyberspace imaginary is not stable or complete,
but anxious and ambivalent, founded on separation and alienation, then
we should not be surprised if it is haunted by the negative terms through
which it is established.
SLIDES: Evil Alien 1
What repressed
material do video games return, then, to the technological imaginary
of cyberspace? Video game play is rooted in the everyday and the here-and-now
- and so in studying them it is hard to ignore the commercial cultural
economy, the imbrication of new media with old , and the embodied, social,
gendered uses and practices of videogame play. SLIDES:Evil
Alien 2
However, video
games can be distinguished from popular science fiction literature and
films, despite their intertextual relationships. For although, as I
have argued, games have developed and sustained images and concepts
of cyberspace - they are in one crucial sense not imaginary at all.
To play a video game is to materially engage with computer hardware
and software as technology and as media, to bring digital spaces and
dramas into existence, to realise, navigate and interact with them.
As Evil Alien indicates, video game play functions on a number
of semiotic, even cybernetic, levels: the science ficion symbolism,
the simulations of physics and conflict, the interaction - through the
software - with the computer itself.
SLIDE: 'Video
games are a window onto a new kind of intimacy with machines that is
characteristic of the nascent compter culture. The special relationship
that players form with video games has elements that are common to interactions
with other kinds of computers. The holding power of video games, their
almost hypnotic fascination, is computer holding power' (Turkle 1984:
60) Cultural and
Media Studies has a tendency to assert the continuities of video games
with existing electronic and visual media such as television and cinema
and their economic and ideological contexts - or even with other domestic
technologies such as dishwashers and microwaves.
Computer-Mediated
Communication and Cyberculture offer conceptual tools for studying the
specificity and excitement of interactive computer media - but do so
in denial of the kinds of historical and cultural contextualisation
facilitated by media studies.
Video
games sit between these converging discourses of the study of new media,
and worry at them all.
I will refer
briefly to the more recent game Syndicate Wars to sum up some of these
points and to call for a fundamentally anxious New Media Studies. The
game is characterised by generic cyberpunk mise-en-scene of an authoritarian
and violent urban future, populate by cyborgs. As a game it presents
an architectural cyberspace to explore in frantic and violent bursts
of narrative. To study and
play such a game is to play with the future (and the present) in three
inter-related ways. 1. in
the sense of playing with popular media images and scenarios of a speculative
near future; 2. in
the sense of playing with computer technology and software algorithms,
in the here-and-now of course, but always suggesting an unfolding of
a technological future; and - importantly...
3. playing with the future in the sense of
playing out and aestheticising anxieties and excitement about technological
and cultural change. This third sense
overlaps the first two - the Imaginary and the materiality of play are
inseparable.
SLIDE: Tron crash sequence SLIDE:
references
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