Revisiting Remediation

Video games have been a pretty big portion of my life since I was little. I really loved escaping into a world surreal and unlike mine own. Having vested a large amount of money and time into them, I have come to know a whole lot about them and their implications in society. I find them to be a form of art not unlike other texts, books, novels, paintings, or films. Personally, I feel that the element of interactivity makes many video games far more engaging and powerful than films. Obviously various media have their advantages, but for our final paper I would like to argue that certain styles of video games can be remediation of film.

This is such a big step to take, and thus I think appropriate to tackle in a final paper. Remediation and Evolution have a close relationship but both are fundamental on the same idea- something has been developed from, or in direct opposition to a current idea and attemps to expand on it or better it. Saying that video games are related to film and improve or differ from them in certain ways inherently ties them to film. I believe this to be a very rich topic with a lot of possibility for expansion, discussion, and argument to be made. To unfortunately expose a lot of my rather embarrassing childhood, I have been discussing video games with a whole plethora of people in person and on the internet since at least 2003 and have seen a whole range of arguments made. In my memory I've never quite seen a fully-composed argumentative thesis comparing film and video games, their development, relationship, and how video games are essentially a remediated form of film. For this reason I think the topic can be unique, deep, full of different angles to explore, and intriguing.

Communications redefined

One major aspect of Darnton's Communication Circuit that has been redefined today is the interaction between booksellers and readers. In our age of instant gratification, immediacy, access, and digitization, we've developed new ways of purchasing and reading books, especially since the advent of the world wide web.

No more are we restricted to getting books from bookstores, libraries, second hand stores, or local book exchanges. With web sites on the internet and internet-capable personal devices, we can acquire whole books without leaving our homes. Previously, books were sold at the traditional "brick and mortar" locations, where the buyer's presence was required for the transaction to take place. Often times, according to Adams and Barker, books weren't even bound and that was the duty of a third-party entity.

The difference in today's first-world society, especially since the advent of the world wide web and electronic banking transfers, we can transfer funds over the internet and purchase a copy of a book from the convenient location of… anywhere that has internet access. The social and official infrastructures our society has put in place allow for an expedited service to deliver the book to the purchaser with almost no effort whatsoever on their part. Giant corporations like Amazon, Half.com, Hastings, and Barnes and Noble all allow books to be purchased electronically over the internet and subsequently shipped to whomever.

Another, even more modern evolution of the communication between booksellers and readers is the recent take-off of electronic "readers." These are small handheld devices that use advanced vector technology to display text on small screens that very closely imitate the look of paper. Internet-capable, they also allow readers to purchase books from almost any location, but have the advantage of receiving a digital copy of their book of choice, allowing them to read the content immediately. This offers tertiary benefits as well, namely being able to browse large selections and storing multiple books on the same small device but these are very much unimportant and irrelevant to the communications circuit and are largely hyperbole. The e-books or e-readers don't offer the advantage of aesthetic appeal, unfortunately, as Adams and Barker elaborate on. They talk about many figures throughout history who used books to display certain things about themselves, because of the books' beauty or subject material. All of that information being lost in digital copies stored on a magnetic platter, the content and messages any book has to convey can still be done digitally. This still allows for the same reception and survival aspects of the newly proposed model Adams and Barker come up with, and arguably these digital copies will have greater impacts and survival because if the aesthetic and lustrous appeal of the books are lost then more likely their purchaser will have more intent to actually peruse their content than the purchaser of a standard physical book.

Ultimately the electronic purchasing system coupled with digital distribution and worldwide shipping allows books to be purchased far easier and by far more people than the previous system of actually traveling to a bookstore, peddler, or pirate. This aspect of the communications circuit, while still structurally the same, has been redefined since before the advent of the internet and electronic book distribution.