Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

I first encountered Bolter and Grusin's Remediation in a rhetoric and technology course I took as a graduate student. I read the first few sections, then the section on computer games, and let the book collect dust until I decided to re-read it from a game studies perspective. The problem was that I found the book quite dry. It reminds me of a "healthy" cereal packed with vitamins but with no yummy marshmallows. To be blunt, I find it boring, especially after reading Lev Manovich's far more moving work on new media. There are precious few "memorable quotations" in Remediation, and much of it feels redundant after the first chapter. The one concession to the reader here is a series of wonderful illustrations—yet they are clustered mostly at the beginning of the book and are in dismal black and white. A set of colorful plates in the middle are nice to look at it, though mostly just color versions of the black and white illustrations. I guess this setup made the book cheaper to publish. Perhaps Bolter and Grusin (B&G) should consider following Manovich's example and publish an illustrations website. I also felt a bit skeptical of the authors' emphasis on virtual reality technology. Is it just me, or is "virtual reality" so 1990s?

I think I can sum up Remediation by quoting one passage from it: "New media are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media, digital visual media can best be understood through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise linear-perspective painting, photography, film, television, and print" (15). B&G claim that all media "remediate" other media in these various ways. The rest of the book offers support for this argument. I'm not really sure why we needed a book to make this argument; to me it has always been obvious that media are interrelated. It is also clear (and I thought pretty clear to everyone) that new media is influenced by older media. What exactly is Bolter and Grusin's contribution, then?

What I find most valuable in the book is the authors' treatment of immediacy and hypermediacy, or "transparency and opacity." I first encountered this juxtaposition in Richard Lanham's book The Electronic Word, where Lanham describes looking "at" rather than "through" a medium. To put it simply, "immediacy" is when we feel immersed in a medium and not thinking "Hey, I'm playing a game now!" Of course, if you were to shake a person and ask, "What are you doing?" The person wouldn't say, "I'm trying to rebuild D'ni," but rather "I'm playing Myst Uru. The point is that we don't actually get so immersed in a medium that we are tricked into thinking we are physically in the virtual world, but only that our attention isn't drawn to the medium as such. An easy example of what I'm talking about is the long loading times of some popular modern console games (such as Jade Empire). Apparently the long waiting times required by these games are enough to break the game's continuity. Another example is "stuttering," or when a computer's resources are over-taxed and a game's animation and sound become jerky, rendering the game mostly unplayable. Obviously, such things diminish "immediacy" because they remind us (in a rather annoying way) that we are only playing a game, and a poorly designed one at that! B&G discuss the "logic of transparent immediacy" and the various techniques practitioners in various mediums attempted to efface their "artifice."

Hypermediacy occurs when we want to notice the interface. The common Windows desktop is an example. We want the icons to be clearly discernible and often want some idea of what our computer is up to (though Windows is known for making its inner workings as mysterious as possible to the user). We see lots of hypermediacy in cartoons, especially older ones. I can remember plenty of Bugs Bunny cartoons in which the characters acknowledge their nature as cartoons and peer out at the audience. I always think of two lovers out on a "date." Of course, there is always something contrived about such events, and part of that contrivance is what makes it so fun. We're not just out with a friend or colleague; we're on a "date" and want the other person (and hopefully others) to be clear about that. It's pretty rotten when you discover at some point that your partner refuses to call it a "date" and says instead that she's just out with a friend. Though we long for the "immediacy" of genuine affection, we also yearn for the "hypermediacy" of being part of a special kind of social event. B&W use PACMAN as an example of hypermediacy: "PACMAN is completely opaque; there is nothing behind or beyond the interface…The game is an interface, and so for the player the immediacy of the experience can only come through acknowledging the medium" (91). This example doesn't sit well with me. I don't know anyone who would really agree with B&G if he or she just thought about what it's like to actually play Pacman. To say we are "playing Pacman as an interface" is rather like saying a child is "playing chess" when in fact she is only playing with the pieces (perhaps chewing on them, even!) You may be "playing" if you are staring at the interface and contemplating it as such, but you're not "playing Pacman." I may seem to be quibbling here, but this issue has really made me question the validity of B&G's "immediacy/hypermediacy" dichotomy and thus a major part of their argument.

Remediation spends a great deal of time discussing something I've always found interesting: painting. In particular, the authors discuss Renaissance painting and the development of perspective. The goal of these artists was to make their paintings look like little windows to the outside world, and tried to make them as "realistic" as possible. However, perspective wasn't enough by itself. Bolter and Grusin write: "To achieve transparency, linear perspective was regarded as necessary but not sufficient, for the artist must also work the surface to erase his brush strokes" (28). It's really fascinating to think about how Renaissance painters tried to hide the evidence of their brush and compare that fixation with how so many modern films try to blend CGI with live-action without it being so noticeable. B&G also make the same claim about modern programmers: "Programmers seek to remove the traces of the presence in order to give the program the greatest possible autonomy" (27). This tendency is very clear in games like Myst, but not so clear in id's Doom series, where the player often encounters references to the game and development team (there's even a special area in Doom 3 where the player receives a "Thank you" from the game's development team and read their "personal thanks." I follow B&G's point, though. Generally, if are attention is drawn to a program as such, it's because of an error or bug. If it acts as we expect it to act, we don't tend to think about who programmed it or how.

B&W take great pains to avoid technological determinism, which means to assert that social changes are brought about by technological developments (as though the technology itself caused the change rather than the people who use it). B&G "explore digital technologies themselves as hybrids of technical, material, social, and economic factors" (76). We all know people who argue that the Internet and computers are evil because there are so many people in poor countries who have no access. Such technologies are only widening the gap, and thus we should ignore them. One of my favorite moments reading Remediation occurred when I read this line: "To condemn new media is to condemn contemporary culture itself—in a kind of jeremiad that has made a few humanists wealthy but has not helped to explain our current cultural moment" (78). I will definitely be using this quotation next time I am confronted by one of those people who attempt to discourage me from studying new media.

I also found B&G's discussion of Myst particularly insightful; probably the most interesting I've read. B&G write, "Almost certainly without the conscious intent of its authors, Myst turns out to be an allegory about the remediation of the book in an age of digital graphics" (94). What B&G have in mind here is how the brothers and Atrus are "trapped" in the book, which actually contain digital video. B&G argue that "in the course of playing, what the Myst player is actually discovering are the moments and strategies by which the computer game remediates the printed book" (96). It's an interesting argument, and one that I can better understand now that I've read Remediation and completed both Myst and its two sequels. The books in the Myst series may be printed books (usually containing vital hints), but also portal books which contain digital video clips which, if touched, transport the character to another "age." The larger story arc is more complex. In various scenes in Riven, we see Atrus "writing" worlds with just his old-fashioned quill, yet when he is finished they become full-fledged "ages" through which people can travel. There is always some (often hokey) pretext to explain why the ages the player visits are so lifeless and empty when they were allegedly once quite busy. It's also a bit questionable how civilizations could flourish in the relatively tiny "ages" of Myst, which usually consist of islands surrounded on all sides by infinite seas. Technically speaking, it would be a nightmare to fully develop all of these ages and populate them with even half-way plausible people (games like Morrowind tend to do this better). The recent game Sentinel handled this problem very well with a much more plausible pretext; the player is not visiting actual worlds but only "shadows," just fleshed out enough to give an impression of what they must have been like.

There are plenty of other interesting discussions in Remediation. I think B&G's description of shopping malls and amusement parks is particularly intriguing. It's fun to think about the various parts of Disney World are supposed to look "like real places," yet no one actually lives there. B&G see a connection to cyberspace here: "Cyberspace is not, as some assert, a parallel universe…It is rather a nonplace, with many of the same characteristics as other highly mediated nonplaces. Cyberspace is a shopping mall in the ether" (179). I really liked this "shopping mall in the ether" metaphor; it's too bad more of Remediation couldn't have contained more pearls like it.

The final section of Remediation is about the self, and our technologies like VR are giving us new possibilities for understanding ourselves. Dystopic movies like The Matrix paint a bleak picture of a world where our minds have transcended our bodies with the help of technology and networks, but B&G see more positive possibilities. VR may eventually allows us "to occupy the position, and therefore the point of view, of people or creatures different from ourselves" (245). Whether people will want to use this to experience what life is like as a starving African dying of AIDS or as Caligula is another matter—yet I see where B&G is going. VR could become the ultimate "empathy" tool and thus represent a powerful tool for humanists.

While I'm glad to have read Remediation and feel that I've profited by doing so, I would more likely recommend Manovich to an aspiring new media scholar. To put it bluntly, Manovich says much of the same stuff but with more pizzazz. Remediation feels "too careful," more like a dissertation than a vibrant work on new media by some of the field's most seasoned and visible members. On the other hand, Manovich relies heavily on his understanding of cinema to make sense of new media, whereas Bolter and Grusin spend more time talking about Renaissance and modernist painting. Both books describe "virtual reality" as the old head-set stuff that we never hear about it anymore except in books like this. I'm beginning to wonder if "new media" is simply too vast of a term to really have much use and would rather stick to one form of new media—videogames, another term which is vast enough to cover almost all kinds of only marginally related phenomena.

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