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The relationship between games and story remains a divisive question among game fans, designers, and scholars alike. At a recent academic Games Studies conference, for example, a blood feud threatened to erupt between the self-proclaimed ludologists, who wanted to see the focus shift onto the mechanics of game play, and the narratologists, who were interested in studying games alongside other storytelling media. The term “ludology” was coined by Espen Aarseth, who advocates the emergence of a new field of study, specifically focused on the study of games and game play, rather than framed through the concerns of pre-existing disciplines or […]
The following sketches a theory of time in games. This is motivated by: (1) plain curiosity; (2) theoretical lack: much work has been done on time in other cultural forms, but there is very little theory of time in games; and (3) the hope that a theory of game time may help us examine specific games, help trace the historical development of games, connect to the big question of how a game feeds player experiences, and generally serve as an analytical tool for opening other discussions in game studies and game design. Most computer games project a game world, and […]
I. “White Noise/White Heat,” or Why the “Postmodern Turn” in Rock Music Led to Nothing but Road – A Preface (of sorts) TEN YEARS BURNING DOWN THE ROAD I wrote “White Light” near the end of the 80s, which had surprisingly proved to be perhaps rock music’s most fertile and innovative decade. I originally wrote the essay as a feature article that appeared in American Book Review in the Spring of 1990 (McCaffery, “White Noise”). I was aware that ABR readers were book-lovers not rock fans, and my main goal in developing the essay that way – i.e., presenting an […]
In Remediation: Understanding New Media (Bolter and Grusin 1999) proposed a theory on media evolution that attempted to break with the myth of the newness of new media and the linear supersession of older media by newer ones (their main target, although this is not the explicit program of the book, is definitely Marshall McLuhan, whose teleological Understanding New Media is clearly meant to be remediated by a more nuanced and more powerful theory). Coining the notion of Remediation, they argued that each new media refashioned at least one older medium. This process of refashioning, however, does not obey a […]
Two histories of optical media have recently been produced in Germany, and at first glance they would seem to be complementary texts. They both cover roughly the same time period – from the origins of linear perspective to the development of virtual reality – and both authors were clearly familiar with each other’s work. Oliver Grau’s Virtual Art is a revised and translated edition of his earlier book Virtuelle Kunst in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Virtuelle Strategien (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Press, 2001), which was itself an expanded version of the dissertation he completed at Humboldt University in Berlin in 1999, and […]
The technologies and speculations associated with “virtual reality” and cognate terms (such as “cyberspace”) have recently made it possible for scores of journalists and academics to develop variations on a favorite theme – the newness of the new, and more specifically, the newness of that new and wildly different world-historical epoch, era, or Zeitgeist into which we are supposedly entering (and on some accounts, have already entered) with the creation of powerful new machines of simulation. The innovative powers of the machines of virtual reality are so extensive, it would seem, that they are even supposed to be able to […]
All forms of “interactive text” demand a physical body with which to interact. When we use the now-common interface that consists of a mouse and keyboard as input devices, and the computer screen as display mechanism, it is easy to forget the body whose eyes perceive the screen, and whose hands and fingers manipulate the mouse and keyboard. In her book How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles (1999) has eloquently explored how “information lost its body.” Hayles investigates the theoretical, historical, and literary maneuvers through which modern society has dissociated information from a body or medium. The consequent elevation […]
Praise for the body art of Camille Utterback, and commentary on controls. Early on in the feature film Superman, reporter and professional victim Lois Lane falls from a helicopter dangling from the roof of a New York skyscraper. Plummeting to her certain death, she is rescued in mid-air by Superman (aka: a man made of steel [and, for all we know, in some instances, of bits and bytes]), in his first appearance both in Metropolis and in the film. Such is his innate tenderness and his fine-tuning as a deus ex machina that he alters his ascending velocity to her […]
First, thank you to both respondents for their insightful and kind comments! To respond: Matt Gorbet critiques my implication that “poetic” interfaces do not allow users to maintain control of the interaction, stating instead that it is precisely the simplicity and clarity of this control that allow my examples to be successful. I agree that whether a work is artistic or purely functional, the connection between a user’s actions and these actions’ effects on the system must be clear and immediate. If a user cannot easily understand how his or her actions affect an interactive system, then the interactivity is […]
Body politics and mouse use scroll through the scene. (To Diane Gromala) 1) “Textuality — an open, infinite process that is meaning-generating and subverting.” Yes. This is one of the forms of textuality that I am interested in. Yet I want to go beyond the logocentric – the analogy of the text in discourse – somehow even in the extended sense of writing that Derrida describes (probably because he is a writer), he seems to bring us back to the way “writing” and/or “text” operate to understand that extension. The central issue is this – I do not believe we […]