Playing with Media's Past Representing the Intangible
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Playing with Media’s Past Representing the Intangible Histories of Media Technology in Independent Videogames MA Thesis Department of Media Studies Graduate School of Humanities 24th June, 2016 Supervisor: Dr. Floris Paalman Second Reader: Dr. Blandine Joret 1 Table of Contents Figures ................................................................................................................................................... 4 Abstract ................................................................................................................................................. 5 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 6 Chapter One: Independent Games, Nostalgia and the Retro Phenomenon .......................................... 8 Nostalgia ............................................................................................................................................ 8 Retro Style in “Indie” Games ............................................................................................................. 9 A Slow Year ........................................................................................................................................ 9 Chapter Two: Remembering the “Early” Internet as a Virtual World ................................................... 11 The “Early” Internet ......................................................................................................................... 12 Videogames as Re-enactments ........................................................................................................ 12 Emily is Away ................................................................................................................................... 12 Digital: A Love Story ......................................................................................................................... 13 Cibele ............................................................................................................................................... 14 Chapter Three: Confronting New Media Culture in Kentucky Route Zero ............................................ 14 Imaginary Media .............................................................................................................................. 15 Kentucky Route Zero’s “Dark Media Archaeology” ......................................................................... 16 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 18 Works Cited ......................................................................................................................................... 19 2 Figures Figure 1.1 “Eyes follow the aimless twig”. A Slow Year. 23 Figure 1.2 “Afternoon craves nap”. Pressing the button shuts 23 the player character’s eyes. A Slow Year. Figure 1.3 “Waken when they meet”. Releasing the button 24 opens the player character’s eyes. A Slow Year. Figure 2.1 Emily is Away’s simulacrum of AOL Instant 32 Messenger. Figure 2.2 Dialing a BBS in Digital: A Love Story. 34 Figure 2.3 Exploring Nina’s desktop in Cibele. 37 Figure 2.4 Inside “Valtameri”, Cibele’s fictional online 39 multiplayer game. Figure 3.1 Spinning Coin, Suspended, Correcting for Angular 46 Motion (1976) in Limits and Demonstrations. Figure 3.2 Visage (1984) in Limits and Demonstrations. 46 Figure 3.3 The player must make Conway drink to progress. 52 Kentucky Route Zero: Act 3. Figure 3.4 The regular road map in Kentucky Route Zero: Act 1. 55 Figure 3.5 The Zero in Kentucky Route Zero: Act 2. 55 3 Abstract From the return of vinyl records and Polaroid cameras, to the popularity of Instagram and retro- styled videogames, the pasts, present and futures of media technology are converging. Media shape and facilitate memory, and now more than ever they are influencing the memory of media technologies themselves. Media experiences are embodied, but much of this sensory data is not accounted for by existing methods of historicising media objects. As amalgams of visuals, sound and interactive systems, videogames can simulate the user experience of past media objects, offering valuable new methods of historicism of interest to historians and media archaeologists alike. Nostalgia and retro style have long been a key presence in independent videogames but a recent trend has seen the emergence of number of independent works which deal specifically with past media objects and the history of new media culture in general. This thesis examines a number of these works - A Slow Year (Bogost, 2010), Emily is Away (Seeley, 2015), Digital: A Love Story (Love, 2010), Cibele (StarMaid, 2015) and Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer 2013-) - and demonstrates how they critically engage with the past in a media archaeological fashion, uncovering the forgotten experiences and possibilities of old media and establishing their new meanings in the present. While partly complicit in popular culture’s ongoing retro phenomenon, they are shown to eschew the accusations of cultural stagnation often levelled at nostalgia and to provide alternative accounts of new media culture than those perpetrated by retro’s corporate historicism. 4 Introduction With the renewed excitement around virtual reality technology, the possibilities and limitations of digital simulation are once again the subject of much popular imagination. While perhaps VR’s most radical proposition is to deliver us into environments totally unlike our own, its capacity to present us with increasingly convincing approximations of the ordinary, physical world is of great interest to archivist and historians, and has been for some time. At the turn of the century, towards the end of the previous VR craze, scholars Bernard Frischer, Diane Favro, Dean Abernathy and Monica De Simone of the UCLA’s Digital Roman Forum project speculated as to how virtual reality apparatus might enhance “3D computer models of cultural heritage sites” (1). Their model, an approximate (albeit meticulous and highly scientific) virtual recreation of Rome’s iconic ancient civic centre as it is believed to have appeared in 400 A.D., was designed to be exhibited via “interactive 3D reality theater”, in which it appeared at a lifelike scale (the theater’s spherical screen measured “7.5 meters in diameter by 2.5 meters high”) and could be navigated by observers (2). Such a project, they imagined, might “be used as a point of departure for a wide range of urban-historical and architectural-historical studies that rely on solid data. That could include, for example, experiential studies involving the alignments of monuments and their impact on the observer” (2). In their report on the Digital Forum, Frischer et al. do note the obvious empirical advantages of a fully rendered 3D model compared to non-digital methods of representing the structure (plaster-of-Paris models “leave out the interior spaces”, while engravings lack “color and photorealism”) (1). However, they are also keen, as in the quote above, to stress the experiential qualities of their project. Unlike a drawing or photograph, they explain, their digital model “can be explored at will in the three dimensions”, and can “offer high interactivity and, potentially, high immersivity when presented in a reality theater” (3). Implicit in their use of terms like “interactivity” and “immersivity” is a desire for a more involved engagement with historical structures than is ostensibly permitted by static, two dimensional renderings. Similarly, their emphasis on the “impact” of their model’s physical characteristics such as its spatial arrangement and sense of scale suggests an interest in a kind of perception-based historical knowledge which virtual reality simulations are propitiously positioned to convey. As well as what it allows us to see, it would seem, just as important to the historical value of the Digital Roman Forum is what it makes us feel. This idea of a preconscious knowledge about an object or space acquired through sensory perception is of course the central tenet of phenomenology. The work of archaeologist Christopher 5 Tilley outlines a precedent for a phenomenological approach to historiography, emphasising the kind of sensory knowledge accessible to an archaeologist who actually visits a site that cannot be derived from “the peculiar perspective of a ground plan, or a map” (153). Such an archaeologist, he posits, understands “...what it feels like to move around inside the passages and chambers: the experiences of light and darkness, constricted spaces and open spaces, the sounds, textures, colours, touch and texture, and other material qualities of the stones” (ibd). Clearly one who engages with the Digital Roman Forum or similar virtual reality projects does not perceive the same breadth of sensory stimuli as they would visiting their respective real world locations. Just as certainly though, following Tilley and Frischer et al., they will nevertheless garner a great deal of additional sensory information than compared with schematic drawings or textual descriptions; one imagines it would be a great deal easier, for instance, to conduct a psychogeographical analysis of the Arch of Septimius Severus from a VR demo than a plaster-of-Paris miniature. This points to a crucial preservational role fulfilled by 3D models of historically important sites. While UCLA’s