Walkthrough: videogames and technocultural form - Seth Giddings

such with the game’s characters, not role-playing characters from a screen drama, for whilst they may choose
to ‘be’ Yoshi, Luigi or Diddy Kong, the motive of this game is the enactment, or the translation, of the
kinaesthetic dynamics of the videogame, its play between speed and ultra-speed, between item and
environment. They are playing at playing with virtual physics.
How then should the videogame be analysed and studied? Videogames are, on one level, popular
media, sets of images on a screen, and refracted through a transmedial prism into merchandising, television
cartoons, feature films. They are also computer technologies, both soft and hard, their hardware marketed as
consumer electronic goods. They are games, play, and as such only exist in the moment or event of their
playing. This thesis will study videogames as new media, noting the continuities with existing popular screen
media, but also identifying the newness of new media and videogames, and exploring the analytical and
conceptual challenges this novelty throws down.
Video games are a window onto a new kind of intimacy with machines that is characteristic of
the nascent computer 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)
As Sherry Turkle indicates, whatever the newness of new media is, it is to do with their digital nature, their
status as computer software and hardware, and the new forms of engagement and experience this nature
facilitates. As the oldest popular new medium, the videogame should be central to the study of new media
on the one hand precisely because of this longevity, accessibility and popularity, and on the other because, as
Sherry Turkle asserts, their playing articulates the non-instrumental experiences, pleasures and intensities
that characterise, in varying ways and to varying degrees, new media technoculture more generally.
arguments
So these little stories indicate much that will be explored throughout this thesis. A key concern is the role of
digital technology and play in generating confusions or renegotiations between usually distinct concepts: in
everyday life and media culture - the new with the old; in the use of computer media - virtual with actual
space; in the moral critique of popular culture - passivity with agency. However this thesis is not only
concerned with the conceptual, with the meanings constructed around computer media, but also the
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