Walkthrough: videogames and technocultural form - Seth Giddings

Druckrey’s vision of repulsive fantasies and hypnotic alienation is not in itself technophobic, not a warning
about technocultural change as a whole. Rather it establishes an opposition between ‘good’ new media and
‘bad’ new media of which the videogame is the exemplar. That the good new media are an anticipated
development, and have yet to be realised is intriguing. To borrow a Darwinian concept from the geneticist
Richard Goldschmidt, videogames might be viewed as ‘hopeful monsters’, aberrations or mutants;
monstrous in themselves but with the potential to bring about quite new entities and effecting radical change
(or in more technocultural terms, paradigm shifts) through macromutation rather than gradual development
(cited in Gould 1977). Alluquere Roseanne Stone, in her book The War of Technology and Desire at the
Close of the Mechanical Age - a key text in the study of cyberculture - effects a similar move, positing
computer games as integral to the development of good new media, yet at the same time as dangerous,
threatening to divert this evolution into the commercial and the trivial. She argues that the one of the first
computer games, Spacewar! (designed and played by the pioneering computer students at MIT in the early
1960s), marks a paradigm shift in the development of computing: from computers as tools to computers as
arenas for social experience. As an example of interactive (and two player) computer media Spacewar!
promised new kinds of media experience: dialogues or conversations with and through computer networks,
even a new public theatre. However, her enthusiasm for Spacewar!'s potential is tempered by its game
nature, and a shoot-'em-up game at that. For Stone, whilst Spacewar! heralds the beginning of the virtual
age, it simultaneously carries the seeds of this virtual age's possible destruction. As a shoot-'em-up game
drawing on popular science fiction to animate simple graphics and physics with a cartoon violence rather
than any narrative or communicative experience, it offers 'no particular redeeming virtue...'. For Stone,
Spacewar!'s lineage - popular videogames - hold 'all the thrill [...] of chopping up Abel Gance's Napoleon to
insert commercials for TV viewing' (Stone 1995: 26). The hope for this monster is that it is a game only by
phenotype, but a far more noble artefact by genotype.
Other new media scholars have celebrated the literary possibilities of the interactive narratives or
images developed in computer and videogames. In an essay on Myst, David Miles identifies interesting
precedents for the game's interactive narrative structure and atmosphere. The list is impressive: the gothic
novel, Parsifal, Verne, modernist literature (Gide, Robbe-Grillet, Borges), Homer, early cinema. The essay is
an imaginative attempt to take the computer game seriously, and to think of what its future might be.
However in doing so it suppresses the 'low' cultural pleasures that have popularised and developed the form.
Importantly, for Miles, Myst is not a ‘videogame’ at all, but an 'interactive multimedia novel on CD-ROM'
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