Remediating Games

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Remediating Games

In some sense, the layered, metacommunicative state of play is similar to our experience of all media. In their book Remediation, theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin analyze the mechanisms by which media function, arguing that media operate according to a double logic. On one hand, media participate in what Bolter and Grusin call immediacy, the ability to authentically reproduce the world and create an alternative reality. At the same time, media also remind their audiences that they are constructed and artificial, a characteristic that Bolter and Grusin call hypermediacy.

Like other media since the Renaissance—in particular, perspective painting, photography, film, and television—new digital media oscillate between immediacy and hypermediacy, between transparency and opacity. Although each medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience, the promise of reform inevitably leads us to become aware of the medium as a medium. Thus, immediacy leads to hypermediacy.^[20]

For example, as Bolter and Grusin point out, a web cam promises immediacy though authentic, real-time access to another part of the world. But the fact that users have to view the web cam on a computer, in an operating system, in a browser, on a web page, inside an interface, reminds them that they are not transparently experiencing the locale where the web cam exists, but are instead interacting with a highly artificial media construct. The main argument made by Bolter and Grusin is that all media combine these two processes into what they term remediation, an experience of media in which immediacy and hypermediacy co-exist.

We can also analyze games within this model. The double consciousness of play finds a strong parallel in the process of remediation, which mixes transparent immediacy with a hyper-mediated awareness of the constructed nature of play. In Cops and Robbers, players willingly take on the theatrical roles of criminals and police, even as they infuse those playful representations with meaning through their actions. In a first-person shooter such as Halo, part of the experience is the sensual vertigo of navigating a coherent, imaginary 3D space. But playing the game also involves an awareness of the game interface, the strategic use of the frame-breaking options, the use of text-based chat, fluctuating server speeds, and the sharing of tips with friends in the larger social context of play. These frame-related aspects of the Halo experience remind the player that the game is a constructed, hypermediated experience.

The value of Bolter and Grusin's model is that it doesn't do away with illusionistic immersion, but includes it as one element within a more complex process. There is no doubt that the immediacy of sensory engagement is part of the pleasure of playing a game, particularly digital games with detailed representations that respond in real-time to player action. The immersive fallacy grossly overemphasizes these forms of pleasure, and in so doing, misrepresents the diverse palette of experiences games offer.

^[20] Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p. 16.