Remediating The Way In Which I Think: Response to Readings

I have had little opportunity to make my way through readings for this course so unfortunately I have only read about half of the text so far. However, of what I have read so far, almost everything has been intriguing, so I thought I would highlight what has caught my eye the most.

Firstly, I found the brief chapter on computer games astonishing. This book was published in 1999 so I feel it is dated, but the fact that it is dated as such gives it an excellent outlook on the next 9 years of video gaming. I had to remind myself that this was before PlayStation2 was even released, so the fact that computer games like Myst, Riven, and Doom are being raved about did not surprise me. As I said in a prior post, gaming has certainly come a long way. The thing I found most astounding was a paragraph on page 93 which boiled down all video games to the same common goal.

“They are assigned explicitly or implicitly the role of security guards, whose simple task is to shoot anything that appears threatening…Ideologically, the player is asked to defend or reestablish the status quo, so that even though the violence of the games appears to be antisocial, the ultimate message is not. It is a message that has prevailed from the early games such as Space Invaders in the 1970’s to such games as Doom and Quake in the 1990’s.” (Bolter and Grusin 93)

This quote seems to boil every video game I have ever played with the exception of sports games to a redundant, seemingly pointless definition. However, the game play is still addictive, even if the point is to just shoot anything that moves.

Second, when reading this section on video games I had an excellent thought on what I could write my term paper on. The outdated text led me to realize that games have become a lot more like films. The basic point of a video game is still to ‘shoot to kill’, yet they are becoming expansive in the realm of story telling and most games have 2-5 minute breaks in game play involving films to advance the plot. When considering this, games are becoming much more immersive and in fact, ‘interactive films’. It can therefore be said that since the text states that television is the remediation of film, and video games the remediation of television, are video games remediating cinema and making it more immersive? I would say so.

Finally, when reading a text for my SOAN: Introductory Methods course I came across a very interesting piece of information:

“The term ‘road rage’ first appeared in 1988, and by 1997, the print media were carrying over 4,000 articles per year on it. Despite media attention about ‘aggressive driving’ and ‘anger behind the wheel’, there is no scientific evidence for road rage.” (Nueman 5)

I found this quite interesting because road rage has become such a highly publicized phenomena. I have heard of some cases where drivers are sent to anger management and to seek other forms of professional help to battle their anger behind the wheel. There is even psychological and sociological investigation into this phenomena, but how can this be justified as good research if it is just some wild goose chase with a catchy phrase that the media spat out one day? Since there is no scientific evidence for it, I was once again captivated by the impact media has on our world.

Works Cited

Nueman, W. Lawrence. Basics of Social Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (2nd Edition). Boston: Pearson Education, 2007.

Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.