betajames

Phenomenology, or the study of how we experience things, works on the assumption that numerous sensations make-up our personal experiences. In games there are three basic ways we experience architecture: as game design, as a personalized space, or through a hybrid of the two. An excellent essay by Laurie N. Taylor highlights the difference between an actual experienced space in a game and one where the space is purely an exercise in design. (”Toward A Spatial Practice in Video Games”, Gameology, 21 June 2005) In the game Super Mario Brothers, you largely only move to the right. Everything in the game exists to impede progress, usually requiring you to jump around. All spaces in the game are hostile, and we never have to conceive of them as anything other than obstacles. Contrast that to a game like Metroid where you will be traversing two long hallways in between zones for most of the game. You get to know those hallways. You think of them as a hub, a spot that means something besides just turn right to avoid danger. That’s when the transition from design into personalized space begins to happen.

In non-horror games it's easy to use combat as the defining gameplay mechanic because there's no need to keep mysterious the beasts lurking in the shadows. In horror, the moment when a monster becomes familiar is when the tension and dread begins to deflate. There's no limit to fear of the unknown, but as soon as an enemy is quantifiable the boundaries are drawn. Fear will eventually become supplanted with frustration or, worse, tedium.

The very absurdity of the global digital system is revealing itself. It created all the instruments for global access and, then, turned around and arbitrarily restricted its commercial use, paving the way for piracy. Think about it: our broadband networks now allow seamless streaming of films, TV shows, music and, soon, of a variety of multimedia products; we have created sophisticated transaction systems; we are getting extraordinary devices to enjoy all this; there is a growing English-speaking population that, for a significant part of it, is solvent and eager to buy this globalized culture and information. But guess what? Instead of a well-crafted, smoothly flowing distribution (and payment) system, we have these Cupertino, Seattle or Los Angeles-engineered restrictions.

The result is a vacancy of purpose, a world full of ‘designer jetsam and flotsam’ that is swilling around or embedded into or above our planet; poorly designed products, unwanted solutions, unfriendly materials, and a mutlichoice of artefacts that are discarded as fast as they were adopted.

The iPhone is an identity. People spoke about their phone as if it were part of their body, and even more a part of their mind, with a weird entanglement of Big Brother anxieties over security — "If someone stole my phone, they could just get in everywhere and retrace my steps everywhere" — and an emotional sense that their phone was who they were. Some people said that without their phone they felt disconnected from the world around them, fuzzy-headed, helpless and incompetent ("I would feel lost without it").

A startling thought! The trickle-down effect of what was popular in entertainment culture, and what was popular in international politics, had pooled in the imagination of children. Not for this generation of kids, the lure of the stars, or the wonders of limitless human invention. Rather, they were destined to be pessimists by default: ready to accept the decline of civilisation, or the death of the Earth, as just the prevailing narrative. They parsed the mass of sci-fi images produced by our culture, interpolated them with terrorism and eco-doom, and decided that the funny bald author guy at the front of the class wanted to see transmissions from a future dark.

No technology has advanced at such a pace in the history of mankind; until the internet existed, if you bought something amazing you could at least rest assured that it wouldn't tell you that it needed an overhaul when you were using it. In the very writing of this article my laptop froze for 30 seconds before presenting me with a list of programs that its integrated AutoUpdate service thought needed a fresh lick of paint.

The lack of honesty and clarity from [Facebook] and its representatives ... and the continued trend of taking established language - such as "open technology" or "data portability" - and corrupting it for its own marketing purposes, is far more disconcerting than the boundaries it's pushing with its technology choices.

Scholars surely understand that on a deep level, yet many persist in the valuing venue and medium over the content itself. This is especially true at crucial moments, such as promotion and tenure. Surely we can reorient ourselves to our true core value—to honor creativity and quality—which will still guide us to many traditionally published works but will also allow us to consider works in some nontraditional venues such as new open access journals, blogs or articles written and posted on a personal website or institutional repository, or non-narrative digital projects.

Facebook is wildly successful because its founder matched new social media technology to a deep Western cultural longing — the adolescent desire for connection to other adolescents in their own private space. There they can be free to design their personal identities without adult supervision. Think digital tree house. Generation Y accepted Facebook as a free gift and proceeded to connect, express, and visualize the embarrassing aspects of their young lives.

Then Gen Y grew up and their culture and needs changed.