3.1 Remediation

I feel it would be somehow irresponsible of me to not begin with my perspective on the writing style present at the beginning of Remediation. Starting with an analogy to a movie I've never heard of is fine; in fact, it seems par for the course with most books I've read in college. Either I'm simply not versed in classical books and movies like I should be or the more obscure the reference, the less likely someone will object to the writer's interpretation of the material.

Regardless, it was the fourth paragraph that hit me like a freight train to the face. "Both new and old media are invoking the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy in their efforts to remake themselves and each other." For the remainder of the paragraph, the writers ignore the fact that they made up a word and continue describing immediacy, a term I'm pretty sure I understand.

But surely they'll get to this term in the next paragraph. Okay, the one after that. "Immediacy depends on hypermediacy." Nice to know, but still uninformative. It isn't until later in that paragraph that I got the first glimpse of a useful context clue: "The CNN site is hypermediated". It's still not as concrete as I'd like, so I assume that I must be missing some obvious and decide to check online for a definition of hypermediacy.

Wikipedia brings up nothing. Nothing. Wikipedia has a page for the past UT student regent, Ben Dower. It can bring up information on weapons used in WWII that I've never heard of. Thinking there might be some mistake, I check Dictionary.com. No found results. I begin to worry a little. But Google is my friend, and brings back plentiful rewards. The first one looks good, especially since the title is A Review of Remediation.

At last I see it:

Hypermediacy is a "style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium" (Bolter and Grusin 272).

A little alarm goes off in my head. I know these names. In fact, I've just recently been reading a book with these names written on the cover. Remediation by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin.

So I flip to page 272, in the glossary, and low and behold the definition is there. And there was much celebration and rejoicing.

Now perhaps I'm missing the point of the term 'immediacy' here, but this entire debacle left me skeptical before I had started the first chapter. This book has links to direct readers immediately to other sections of the book but allows readers to struggle with defining a new term for the intro. Maybe I just missed some obvious hints or am a little slower than the average reader, but if people crave immediacy, why fail to define a key term that is prevalent throughout the entire book the first time it appears? Or why not use the links that are scattered randomly throughout the book to point to the glossary to define this conjured term?

But perhaps that was intentional. Maybe the writers knew exactly what they were doing. It took me only a few pages before I resorted to checking another source to get information on the current media I was looking at. Within minutes after a 404 error in the book I was redirected to Wikipedia and shortly after that was linked back to Remediation. I really do like my immediacy.

Or maybe it wasn't intentional and either I'm a little slow or the writers could have been more clear. Whatever.

Apart from my inadequate interpretations, I took great interest in the analysis of computer games since my undergraduate work involved considerable interest in the topic. That, and I enjoy playing games.

It is very interesting to see different perspectives on video games. I had never considered action games to be a matter of maintaining equilibrium; on the contrary, I was under the impression that the opposite is the goal through the destruction and destabilization of the 'enemy', whether it happens to be invading aliens or something more conventional.

The description of Myst brings back fond memories of scribbling in a journal little secrets about a strange island. It is interesting that the writers consider the game to be distinctly film-like, because the graphics aren't as photo-realistic and the island isn't entirely believable. One might think the interactivity would play a role in making the player feel as though they were on Myst island. And now we have games built with such tools as the Crysis engine which strive to make the world around the player appear quite real and offer a level of interaction not available through film. It would be interesting to see what Bolter and Grusin think of how games have developed in the past decade since they now no longer "rely ... on their special claim to immediacy through interaction."

Social interaction in games ties into an important concept with emerging media: user-generated content. Much like members of Twitter or people who post on Blogs, the creations of people who play games like Little Big Planet or Spore can forge their own creations within this space and share their designs with the world. The hypermediacy of the tools in the 'creator' parallel the transparency of the final creations once they come into existence in play, yet the two environments coexist in separate portions of the game. Now, if only there was a game that provided both without the distinct separation... perhaps something to look forward to.