Walkthrough: videogames and technocultural form - Seth Giddings

concerns about videogame play’s apparent tendency to blur the distinctions between onscreen action and
everyday experience. It could be argued that such anxieties are not solely either simply mistaken or
ideologically motivated, that instead they could be symptomatic of very real differences between ‘old’ and
‘new’ media, not least in relation to the distinct, ‘interactive’, modes of engagement with media images and
scenarios afforded by computer technology. Videogames do establish new, intimate, and literally cybernetic
relationships between screen media, ‘consumers’, and digital circuits and networks, and do raise important
questions about what is communicated, and how, in a medium that might more accurately be described as
simulational than representational (see Part 3). On one level then (and without wishing to overstate the
importance of the ill-informed and inaccurate accounts of videogame culture outlined so far) suspicions
about the dangers of videogames may, inadvertently offer some analytical insight. They certainly highlight
key binary oppositions and the ethical and cultural value systems constructed upon them, oppositions in
which the commercial, the synthetic and the machinic are bad, the artistic, the natural and the human are
good.
virtual realism
A particularly persistent binary opposition is that between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’. Videogames are a key
exemplar of the perception that distinctions between the real world and mediated or simulated realms will,
or have, collapsed. Depictions of violence become violence, ‘immersion’ in virtual worlds is actual oblivion in
everyday media consumption, the compelling verisimilitude of videogame images – and the players’ ‘control’
over them is the advent of an age of simulation and a fatal loss of the real. There is a remarkable congruity
between some journalistic and theoretical discourses, the latter generally based in a reading of Jean
Baudrillard’s work on simulation and hyperreality (Baudrillard 1983). An example of this is Andrew Darley’s
book on popular digital screen media (2000) in which he sets out in detail a Baudrillardian dystopia in which
videogames, alongside other digital media such as CGI special effects in popular film, herald a new era of
depthlessness and loss of meaning. The Columbine shootings have already been mentioned, but perhaps the
most persistent popular manifestation of this is commentary on the 1991 Gulf War. The thorough control of
news media by the coalition states, and the spectacle of 'smart' weapons and video footage from missiles at
their point of impact epitomised a popular notion of 'simulation' as a conflation of digital and video imaging
technology and a sense of a remote, mediated experience (by both domestic audiences and Western
military). This 'simulation' was explicitly figured in terms of video games, as General Norman Schwartzkopf’s
phrase 'the Nintendo war' resonated across the news media and academic discourses (Sheff 1993: 285). Mia
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