Paper Abstract - Seth Giddings

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PLAYING WITH THE FUTURE:
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ABSTRACT

Playing with Theory: The Technological Imaginary and a 'New Media Studies'

Seth Giddings

Video games are the oldest popular 'new medium'. Engendering both fear and fascination, they threaten (or promise) new intimacies with machines, new images and worlds, frightening narratives of symbolic violence and addiction. Until recently, academic responses to this new form have tended to be as contradictory and ill-informed as popular, journalistic discourses. The various theoretical discourses addressing computer-based media have largely marginalized or excluded the popular, commercial and commodified versions of digital media and information technologies of which games are the most significant example. Within educationalist studies of media technology for example, games are a dangerously seductive distraction from learning, or at best offer themselves as Trojan Horses or sweeteners for the real business of computer use. Within cyberculture games haunt the fringes of MUDs and hypertext, as gendered commodified toys, other to the online heterotopias of identity play. It is evident that such discourses celebrate digital culture by repressing and contexts for the development of new media.

Making reference to both the Game Cultures conference and the forthcoming New Media: A Critical Introduction, this paper will argue that the study of the video game as a highly significant medium in its own right, crucial to the development, dissemination and popularisation of computer-based media, should be central in any emergent 'new media studies'. Moreover it will be argued that the study of video games affords a critical analysis of significant structural omissions and exclusions within discourses such as cyberculture and computer-mediated communication - not least the role of the economy and popular images and texts.

This argument will be developed by addressing the notion of the 'technological imaginary'. The technological imaginary is taken to mean the ways in which 'dissatisfactions with social reality and desires for a better society are projected onto technologies as capable of delivering a potential realm of completeness' (Lister et al. 2002). The playful interaction with digital space that characterises video game play, it will be argued, historically and aesthetically underpin and inform the technological imaginary if discourses of new media more generally - the sense of expectation and revolutionary possibilities generated around, on the one hand such technologies as virtual reality systems, the internet, and more nebulous concepts of cyberspace and and imminent 'virtual world', and on the other, the ways in which such technologies or media are accessed and interacted with: as 'immediate' (Bolter and c' (Aarseth), 'cybernetic' or immersive.

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