Final Paper Proposal

My proposed thesis for this paper is that any plot or story-driven video game is essentially a form of remediated film. My goal is to deeply analyze the relationship between films and video games and how they've worked off of each other.

My outline is as follows: 

Introduction broadly connects how we consume and digest media; what we seek out of it, what we get, how we get it, and show how these things might obviously tie film and video games together. Ultimately talk about the connection between film and video games, especially concerning their narrative.

aybe an extended introduction or the first part of the body might involve a more intense looking at remediation and really reifywhat it means for something to be remediated. Or compare/contrast it with evolution. This could possibly be saved as the last part of the body, and should be brief because it's not the main point behind the paper.

In the body video games would need discussing in detail. Not necessarily games themselves, but sort of the mechanics of the storytelling, the narrative they use, the messages they can convey, theatrics in games, and the relationship films and games have.

Ultimately I would try and show how video games have borrowed a lot of production values in film, and how they convey a plot, and through their own production values they can be especially theatrical But as in remediation, they are more and different than film in that they engross the player on a more intimate level. The control of a character(s) can provide an intimate relationship with the plot unlike films, and of course interactivity is a very different medium all around.

Works Cited

Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000. Print.

This class reading is the defining work on what exactly remediation is, and will prove crucial to understanding the difference between remediation and evolution, and is necessary to differentiate what video games do versus what films do.

Galloway, Alexander R. "Social Realism in Gaming." Game Studies 4.1 (2004). Web. 2 Dec. 2010.

This article discusses the realism developers strive for in many games of this and last generation. Though he refers not only to poly counts and anti-aliasing, he discusses the tendency to make cultures, locations, and peoples represented in games as accurately as possible. This is vital to the idea of video games and films being close relatives.

Hanson, Matt. "Film Futures in the Digital Age." The End of Celluloid: Film Futures in the Digital Age, by Matt Hanson. RotoVision. Web. 03 Dec. 2010. <http://www.endofcelluloid.com/>.

This is the website of the book by Matt Hanson that allegedly challenges and redefines film. It mentions video games several times in relation to film, and discusses the relationship between the two; what I seek to do as well in my paper.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Beyond Myth and Metaphor." Game Studies 1.1 (2001). Web. 2 Dec. 2010.

Marie-Laure Ryan describes narrative in detail, specifically its function in digital media. As the majority of this paper will be analyzing just that, this article is perfect.

Sisler, Vit. "Digital Arabs: Representation in Video Games." Digital Islam. Web. 2 Dec. 2010. <http://www.digitalislam.eu/article.do?articleId=1704>.

This article discusses representation, the construction of meaning through words or symbols. It's mainly a cultural studies article about how American and European games portray Arabs, but underneath that meaning is a secondary subtext that describes the power of video games to represent and convey meaning through narrative, a powerful tool for this paper.

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.

Children; Our Future

As Crain argues in her chapter "The Republic of ABC: Alphabetizing Americans," the way we're taught discipline, literacy, discourse, and structure shapes the way we think and how we perceive culture. One of Crain's example is a common word-association alphabet in the eighteenth century that associated things with the letters of the alphabet, and because noblemen, kings, beggars, soldiers, etc., were some of the things associated with letters, it instilled a sense of class and hierarchy in the children who were exposed to these media.
I'm going to use the same example- how the alphabet and certain word-letter associations would associate very different cultural meanings on our chlidren.

If we lived in a socialist community, where the community was the highest valued idea, the alphabet taught to children would look very different. A would stand for Alarm, the thing that makes every good worker get out of bed on time to go to work. B would stand for the Bricklayer, who makes all of our buildings, C would stand for Coal that keeps the great furnaces of the nation burning, so on and so forth.

As Crain argues, this works two ways. Children are acculturated by these learning devices, and then as they age and become part of the system they shape the culture. So a Marxist/Socialist style country that produces this media would possibly raise children with a predisposition towards those ideas, children who are permanently acculturated in a society where community is center of all government. These children would then go on to promote the society even more. It's not just the society imparting its ways onto its children, these children eventually grow into the society and shape it.

Likewise, in the society that would teach children through catechisms children would be far more predisposed towards faith, the bible, and Christianity. A might stand for Adam, B for Bible, C for Christ, D for Deuteronomy, E for Eve, F for forgiveness...

These cultural mnemonics mean significant things down the road. When an entire society of people was raised on "A for Adam," at some point in their lives they have to remember the letter A as the signifier for any reason, the signified "Adam" automatically comes to mind, which instantly generates the Bible, Christianity, and all of the implications of that in their mind. Likewise, a society that thinks "A for Alarm" would think of the signified "Alarm" every time they had to use the alphabet, and would thus be reminded of getting up to go to work like a good citizen. Having these cultural leanings in one's mind can affect the construction of someone's entire being within their culture, as is the basic premise of Crain's argument.

Internet Authorship Scrutiny

I hope by now this particular case hasn't been done to death, but I couldn't get my mind off of the vast expanse that is the internet when I was reading Adrian Johns' book.


His entire thesis is that our notions of veracity in print is not inherent- printed texts aren't reliable, authoritative, and their content isn't true by virtue of the fact that they are printed texts. The accuracy of the information in print is only possible with lots of effort and construction put into the system to make it so- and it's made so that we can easily digest it without any acknowledging of the work that goes on behind the scenes of printed materials.

His evidence is that throughout the early modern period when print was in its beginnings, textual media wasn't as solid and fixed as it is now. The Manuscripts article too discussed the mechanics of copying and how copies of texts were made in the early modern period. Johns' article discussed in detail that one could never really rely on text as some unfaltering source of true information, that if a reader picked up a book "he or she could not be immediately certain that it was what it claimed to be." He then discusses Tycho Brahe and how his distributed works differed from place to place depending on where they were made and the circumstances they were acquired in. It really challenges the idea that print culture promotes the basis of gaining knowledge, that "durable paper entities" are the foundation of learning.

That being said, we are experiencing the same thing all over again in this era regarding the dissemination of knowledge over the internet. As Johns argued, there weren't always the legislation, practices, and systems in place to guarantee the accuracy and authority of all printed media that we take for granted, and as I argue, there aren't totally solid and reliable systems in place to censor all of the information online, at least not nearly as well-established ones as we have for print today. The internet is a mess, simply put. With such a ridiculously large host of information out there planted by almost anybody and everybody worldwide, there's no control over who can post, when, where, and what. The systems we have established to authorize content online only really work for a small portion of the content. Things like Creative Commons and Copyright laws help make sure that some authors are credited for their work, along with other systems. But at the point the internet is at now, it's impossible to guarantee that information or media discovered online is accurate and true. Only after much scrutiny and research can we guarantee anything- very much like the world Johns discussed in the early modern era. There are definitely parallels with what he was saying about printed texts back then and texts online today.

I also couldn't help but notice how this tied in with something Ong said in work of his we had to read a few weeks ago- something about how oral accounts had much higher gravity and veracity than printed accounts back when print was just getting started, and nobody gave written accounts as much significance and weight as they do today.

Free Form Poetry's .... Form

In the Drucker and McGann article, a take-home point of theirs' was that "The presentational form of texts and images usually masques their logical operations in a surface rhetoric that dominates and controls our conscious attention." I take this to mean that when we read a text- say a book, article, etc., the way our writing-conscious brains work is that we try our best to absorb the content or message the author is getting at. In this process we almost completely ignore the form, composition, arrangement, and graphical nature of the text. I don't believe this to be entirely true, at least in the all-inclusive sense. Yes, generally, when reading a book or paper or article we will absorb the information and throw the concept of form away. However, we use several elements that are included in the graphical nature, or the logical arrangement of text to enhance some elements. Some minor examples- manicules, engorged first letters, color, certain typefaces, the ability to turn on "invisibles" in Office Word programs, and skewed lettering. All of these are examples of the "logical operations in a surface rhetoric" that actually aren't masked by their presentational form, and we very much use it to enhance their noticeability, even.

My primary example and the subject of this entry is free form poetry. The very title itself refutes the idea that we abandon form in texts. Free Form Poetry is the antithesis to that notion. The form of free-form poetry, while not always contrary to the normal form of written language, definitely differs from the ordinary line-after-line of normal text we see. Its presentational form opens up the way we see it, and not only doesn't mask its logical operation but enhances it. For example, the use of space in free form poetry could (not always) completely change the way we read something and give it new meaning- part of its logical operation. Normally, we just take the idea of space for granted as that little invisible (not always so if you have an Office Word Program!) divider between words that does nothing but prevent our beautiful text from being an alphabetic jumble. When you incorporate





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spaces between your words it emphasizes them and thus draws attention to the form of the text.

Conscious Assessment of Print

Tim Carmody describes the Print Revolution in his article "10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books." He discusses how print changed the way we interact with a text fundamentally, and I think this is very true.

Walter Ong claims in chapter 3 of his book "Orality and Literacy" that writing restructures consciousness. This is very relevant to the print revolution of the Renaissance that Carmody was talking about- print changed the way we consciously experience a text.

Oral speech, as Ong discusses in the chapter, is a social act that takes place in a specific location at a specific time, and is challengeable. For the longest time people, even those exposed to writing, would hold oral communication much more reliable than written word. When interacting with print, everybody interacts with an exact copy of the same print, so a print that was distributed could reach many individuals and offer a sense of community- after all somebody else somewhere was experiencing this same exact text. Further more, like all writing, it's experienced away from its creator and at a different date, so there is that disconnectedness. So instead of interacting with a person, they're interacting more directly with the text itself. The author is writing it for a large audience and therefore has to cater it to the people. "The writer must set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves..." (Ong 100). That is where the community aspect is built, several, perhaps hundreds or thousands of people reading, interacting with the same text. Also, as Carmody argues, this helped to change readers' expectations of texts in the future.