| Civilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity, and Space by Ted Friedman From Discovering Discs: Transforming Space and Genre on CD-ROM edited by Greg Smith (New York University Press, forthcoming) Introduction: New Paradigms, Old Lessons There was a great Nintendo commercial a few years back in which a kid on vacation with his Game Boy starts seeing everything as Tetris blocks. Mount Rushmore, the Rockies, the Grand Canyon - they all morph into rows of squares, just waiting to drop, rotate, and slide into place. The effect is eerie, but familiar to anyone who's ever played the game. The commercial captures the most remarkable quality of video and computer games: the way they seem to restructure perception, so that even after you've stopped playing, you continue to look at the world a little differently. This phenomenon can be dangerous - as when I finished up a roll of quarters on Pole Position, walked out to my car, and didn't realize for a half mile or so that I was still driving as if I were in a video game, darting past cars and hewing to the inside lane on curves. More subtly, when the world looks like one big video game, it may become easier to lose track of the human consequences of real-life violence and war. Any medium, of course, can teach you how to see life in new ways. When you read a book, in a sense you're learning how to think like the author. And as film theorists have long noted, classical Hollywood narrative teaches viewers not just how to look at a screen, but how to gaze at the world. But for the most part, the opportunities for these media to reorient our perceptions today are limited by their stylistic familiarity. A particularly visionary author or director may occasionally confound our expectations and show us new ways to read or watch. But for the most part, the codes of literary and film narrative are set. We may learn new things in a great book or movie, but we almost always encounter them in familiar ways. | |
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