In his “Manifesto for a Ludic Century”4 the game designer and game design theoretician Eric Zimmerman presents the thesis that a structural affinity exists between the fundamental characteristics of digital technology and the fundamental characteristics of games, analog as well as digital: “Games like Chess, Go, and Parcheesi are much like digital computers, machines for creating and storing numerical states. In this sense, computers didn’t create games; games created computers.”5 Beyond that, digital networking would promote evermore-complex information systems. For a digital culture shaped by such systems, games would be the ideal medium thanks to their systematicity: “[G]ames are dynamic systems […] While every poem or every song is certainly a system, games are dynamic systems in a much more literal sense. From Poker to Pac-Man to Warcraft, games are machines of inputs and outputs that are inhabited, manipulated, and explored.”6
Film and television, the defining media of the 20th century, corresponded—with the linearity of their passively received audivisions—to the information and entertainment needs of industrial work and culture. Digitalization, however, writes Zimmerman, initiated a categorical metamorphosis: “In the last few decades, information has taken a playful turn. […] When information is put at play, game-like experiences replace linear media.”7 Games would, therefore, become the most important medium of the ludic 21st century: “Increasingly, the ways that people spend their leisure time and consume art, design, and entertainment will be games—or experiences very much like games.”8
Zimmerman’s “ludic manifesto” can be understood as a concise depiction of perspectives and opinions that are circulating in contemporary culture. Indeed, before our eyes a lasting medial upheaval is taking place that targets audiovisual forms of expression and representation. Their transformation is the product of technological progress—a development which has already occurred twice in modern times.9
Between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, mechanization brought about the theater of illusion with its proscenium or picture-frame stage, outfitted with the most modern technical means available. For example, equipment and procedures used in shipbuilding to quickly move heavy objects were put into practice in theaters to move sets and even actors. Thanks to its mechanical means for manipulating space and time, the theater of illusion and its most important genre, the drama, became the genuine audiovisual form of storytelling in the pre-industrial period.
With the next technological push brought about between the Enlightenment and postmodern times through industrialization, photography was introduced, followed by film and, finally, television; the last two, of course, were based on the technology first developed for and by photography. Through means of stored, edited and “made to move” pictures and sounds, time and space could be manipulated as never before and new kinds of stories could be told audiovisually. This categorical performance increase over the theater—the potential for a successive development of epicness of audiovisual representation—film and television owe to evermore-advanced industrial recording, storing, editing, distribution and transfer techniques. In the medium of linear audiovisuality, feature films and television series emerged as genuine and dominant storytelling methods of industrial culture. Thus, since the early 20th century, first silent movies, then talkies, and finally television influenced the audiovisual construction of reality and its perception.
Against this media-historical background it should be no surprise that aesthetic consequences are also tied to the current technological push: digitalization. Digital software allows the recording, generation, storing, editing, distribution and interactive manipulation of texts and sounds, as well as still and moving pictures. Through two unique characteristics, software thereby distinguishes itself from all analog media as a means of production and storage. First, software is transmedial. In the universal medium of stored bits and the software programs with which they can be edited, the analog diversity of specific media and tools—paper and typewriter, celluloid, camera and cutting room, vinyl, magnetic tape, microphone and mixing board etc.—is unified. Second, the digital transmedium possesses a ‘fluidity’ that, together with feedback systems, to a large extent eliminates the primacy of chronology that characterizes analog mediality.10 In this quality lies the principal interactivity of the transmedium known as software.
This potential for transmediality and fluidity is aesthetically realized above all in digital games. Earlier, movies simultaneously expressed the experiences of, and impacted, industrial culture—not least in the industrial work environments of hierarchical and linear processes. The experiences of digital culture are expressed similarly today in digital games, which are now also impacting the postindustrial work environment that is characterized by knowledge-work, i.e., networked manipulation of digital symbols. The machine as central metaphor for industrial culture is replaced by the game as a central metaphor for digital culture.11
Society, said Niklas Luhmann, creates media for the purpose of self-observation.12 Digital games are the youngest means—medium—for such reality construction and, thereby, also for perceiving the world as well as for self-perception. As Noah Wardrop-Fruin writes, games allow us—more so than linear audiovisual media do—“to understand our evolving society, in which (often hidden) software models structure much of how we live now.”13 In the interactive mirror of digital games we experience ourselves and search for an understanding of what is under development in our everyday lives—a digital society and culture just as different from the industrial culture of the 19th and 20th centuries as that culture was distinct from the society and culture of the preindustrial period.
The first part of this book (I Games) describes how digital games went from their—audiovisually as well as narratively restricted—beginnings in the middle of the past century to the equally narrative and hyperrealistic medium of today that is able to compete with film and television. The starting point is formed by an analysis of the diverse attempts to define analog as well as digital games (I-1 What is a game? Systematic and Historical Approaches). The overview leads to the understanding that, like all media and arts, digital games can only be understood in their historical development. The second chapter, therefore, outlines the history of games in the context of modern media and the arts (I-2 Games in the Modern Era: A Short Media History). The broader focus then lies on the three artistic-technical pushes in which digital games have evolved since the middle of the 20th century (I-3 Procedural Turn, since the 1950s; I-4 Hyperepic Turn, since the 1970s; I-5 Hyperrealistic Turn, since the 1990s). At the preliminary end of this development, digital games characterize themselves in their otherness in relation to both analog games and linear audiovisions.14 I seek to define this otherness in the sixth chapter (I-6 The Double Alterity of Digital Games). A further turn that has been transpiring for several years now has led to the proliferation of natural user interfaces (NUIs) and ‘natural’ ways of interacting with virtual worlds and non-player characters (NPCs). This turn should further strengthen the categorical otherness of digital games (I-7 A Look Ahead: Hyperimmersive Turn?).
In the development of digital games, their relation to film has carried a special meaning. Since the 1980s both of these forms of audiovisual media have been engaged in a close technical, economic and aesthetic exchange, while at the same time they have been competing for both consumers and talent. More than a few artists and theoreticians have even envisaged a merging of the two audiovisual media. The Intermezzo: Game // Film
