game of British provinces to a global game that excited all classes and was experienced by the majority of humanity as spectators.
With the rise of analog-electronic and then digital games since the 1960s, SOCCER inevitably migrated to this medium as well. The first electro-mechanical soccer game CROWN SOCCER SPECIAL came out in 1967.34 Many other arcade and PC games followed. The decisive breakthrough of SOCCER into virtuality, however, occurred only with soccer manager and soccer simulator games starting in the 1990s. Of these ANSTOSS—DER FUSSBALLMANAGER (1993-2006), FIFA INTERNATIONAL SOCCER and FIFA (since 1993) as well as PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER (since 2001) were the most successful. Of the diverse incarnations of the FIFA series alone, Electronic Arts sold over 100 million copies, by their own account.35 In this way digital soccer games ushered in a new phase of massively active participation, which was no longer played out in reality, but in virtuality. SOCCER seems to be transforming anew from a spectator to a player sport. Whoever enters a living room today and sees people in front of an HD screen cannot—at least from some distance—immediately discern whether a match is ‘running’ and being ‘watched’ or if the supposed spectators are playing the game themselves.
QUATERNARY MEDIALITY:
FROM SPECTATOR TO PLAYER
When Harry Pross presented his taxonomy of mediality a half-century ago the development of the digital transmedium—especially in the context of European culture—was hardly predictable. In this respect his theories need to be expanded and even partially corrected to account for our current situation. Tertiary media required, as Pross recognized, technology on both sides of the communication process. But with regard to digitalization, the tertiary broadcast and reception technology need to be defined more clearly. The analog mass media radio and television allowed merely the transmission of fixed and standardized works in one direction: from a few producers or broadcasters to many consumers or receivers. Those watching and listening could not ‘send back.’ They were, therefore, incapable of interacting with those offering the content nor with the offered content itself or with other listeners or viewers. Therefore, Pross’s definition of tertiary mediality has to be expanded beyond the current perspective in respect to the fact that the technology used for broadcast media is principally one-way technology. It does not empower the receiver with any sort of responsive or interactive capability and, vice versa, hinders the broadcaster and the content being broadcasted from receiving any responses.36
In the course of digitalization yet another mediality came into being that uses technology on both ends of the communication process, yet has back channels at its disposal—whether this potential for interaction is placed at the user’s disposal or not. For also under the conditions of digital production and distribution the creators of linear audiovisions follow the tradition of film and its artistic prerogatives. Whether they continue to operate in the context of traditional offline media of film and television or already in online media, they present their audiences a final cut version as a closed work. They reserve, therefore, for themselves and their creative manipulation of software files the inherent interactive possibilities of the transmedium. Game designers, on the other hand, integrate the capability of interacting with particular elements of digital audiovisions through the interface of their games, and furthermore, they often give players control over deeper changes in the game via so-called Mods or modifications.
From a media historical perspective, therefore, quaternary mediality37, i.e., the transition to the digital transmedium and its multichannel communication, directly influences the production as well as the reception of audiovisions. For one, it initiates a fusing of the creative authority that characterizes the manual production of imagery with the qualities of industrial reproduction. From the 1970s through the 1980s the technical and aesthetic development of hyperrealistic audiovisuality occurred primarily in the context of the—American—motion picture industry and on the technical basis of pre-rendering. However, since the 1990s, game engines have been realizing the potential of quaternary mediality for the real-time generation of virtual images and sounds—in nearly ‘photorealistic’, i.e., lifelike quality.38
Secondly, the integration and drastic escalation of reception methods associated with primary, secondary, and tertiary mediality were attained on the side of the receivers or users. In virtuality, it is possible for the first time to almost arbitrarily choose and switch between other-determined, self-determined, and interactive use of medial artifacts. Thereby it appears that the digital transmedium is ushering in a historical turnaround, or perhaps a reversal, to a mode of thinking in regard to the culturally dominant behavior towards aesthetic artifacts.
The sweeping immobilization of the audience—in the theater, the museum, the movie theater, in front of radio and television—was, as is generally known, an achievement of industrial culture. Until late in the 19th century, for example, theater auditoriums were not darkened. Contemporary illustrations and descriptions document to what degree the audience, who could see and hear each other and understood attending the theater as a social event, interacted among each other and even with the actors, whether by praising or heckling them. It was Richard Wagner in Bayreuth who first introduced collective tunnel vision from the darkened auditorium toward the stage. For reasons of aesthetic contemplation, his arrangement constituted a proto-cinematic form of reception that the movies would later require for technical reasons.
The early cinema was then also faced with the difficult task of preventing the audience—now mostly from the middle and lower classes—from general uproar and outbursts of dissatisfaction, especially from throwing objects at the actors, i.e., the projection screen, as theater attendees were accustomed to doing at live performances. The obvious connection between what the new industrial media demanded of their audiences, and what the industrial way of life demanded in general, has often been commented on.39 A relatively clear line from the training for physical and communicative passivity combined with the necessity to pay exceptional attention to quickly changing situations in art and entertainment, can be traced to a dual phenomenon: first, the experiences enabled by new transportation methods such as railroad and automobiles; secondly, the challenges of industrial work that relied on standardized, passive behavior that seemed to almost be controlled remotely but had to be, of course, self-controlled.
In contrast, digital knowledge work is characterized by acting independently in the creative, also thoroughly exploratory, and thereby playful, manipulation of software programs and files and their virtual symbols.40 From this perspective it is hardly surprising that at the same rate as empowered knowledge work—especially in the so-called ‘creative industries’—is becoming the most important source of economic growth, so, too, are changes in cultural behavior toward aesthetic artifacts taking shape. Playfulness, which was important in pre-industrial times, was forced by industrialization into the private sphere (and from there expelled to the edges of what was considered high culture)—with some good reason, considering the violence and danger arising from industrial machines and processes. In an attempt to belittle games in comparison to books, Harry Pross wrote: “In the […] sector […] of free-time and incompetence, the game is at home in numerous forms.”41 From there, however, it is returning—in the course of a “movement from a culture of calculation to a culture of simulation”42—into the center of postindustrial civilization. The contradiction between work-ethic and play-ethic that industrial rationality assumed, and that existed in factories as well as in bureaucracies, is gradually dissipating.
With some consequence the phantasmic secular space, in which
