MEDIA ECOLOGY
We can only imagine the kind of cryptic observations Marshall McLuhan might have made about video games if he’d lived a little longer. The man was indeed a provocateur, poking at one of the major features of the modern era: the increasing importance of machines for human communication. His pithy statements and enigmatic ideas are impossible to prove, but as tools to spark intellectual curiosity, they work very well (Carey, 1998).
In the trippy 1960s, McLuhan’s thoughts made him a kind of academic pop star—in both the positive and pejorative senses. However, he was not actually the lone figurehead of an isolated line of thought. He himself claimed (McLuhan, 1962) to draw inspiration from the Canadian economic historian Harold Innis (1950/1972, 1951). Important writings of Lewis Mumford (1934) and Edward T. Hall (1956/1990) preceded most of McLuhan’s work and had similar themes. And around the same time McLuhan published Understanding Media in 1964, Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato (1963/1967), and Jack Goody and Ian Watt’s article “The Consequences of Literacy” (1968) demonstrated similar concerns about the cultural impact of communication technologies. Numerous other scholars have further developed the ideas of this body of scholarship over the past few decades, including McLuhan’s students Walter Ong, who wrote about the cultural transition in the West from orality to literacy (1967, 1982), and Neil Postman, the witty and articulate critic of modern media and technology (1985; 1993); McLuhan’s colleagues at University of Toronto, such as anthropologist Edmund Carpenter (1960) and physicist and linguistic scholar Robert K. Logan (2000); as well a variety of others who have drawn on his work such as print historian Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979), media scholar Joshua Meyrowitz (1985), and digital culture critic Douglas Rushkoff (2010).
While these works form a diverse body of scholarship, running through all this media ecology theory is a concern with how technology has a shaping role in our communication and culture. The main argument is that the media we use are particularly good for certain communicative practices and not so good for others—they have a bias, as Innis put it (1951). Because of that bias, a print culture is likely to be different from a video game culture.
Anyone reading any amount of cultural criticism or sociology knows that this is a controversial argument, to put it mildly. Most scholars in the Cultural Studies tradition sniff at McLuhan as a crass technological determinist. Media ecology, goes the critique, ignores the flexibility of culture, the agency of viewers and players, social power structures, and struggles, ignores the socially-constructed nature of technology, and ignores the tremendous importance of the context of the functioning of technology. So is it even possible for media ecology to contribute anything to game studies?
This perspective is relevant to contemporary game scholarship, albeit with some careful caveats. The criticisms of media ecology are often well-founded and require a careful interrogation of what we mean by key terms such as “medium,” “communication,” and “technology.” Nevertheless, technologies are not culturally neutral—they are not blank slates upon which we can write any agenda or expression with equal ease, and communication technologies have a special importance to our culture. We need to go beyond technological determinism in order to revisit media ecology. In this essay, then, I will work through some of the relevant objections to media ecology and suggest ways in which we can better understand this perspective, ending with a brief sample of a media ecology analysis of the video game medium.
The Basic Concept of Media Ecology
Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) carefully builds the case that the arrival of the written word is a cultural watershed: once people become truly literate, everything changes. Ong notes, for instance, that oral cultures foster tremendous memory skills, as that is the only way to preserve knowledge; he backs this up with (among other evidence) Albert Lord’s research of Yugoslavian oral poets, who were able to recite enormous epics with little change from performance to performance. Eisenstein (1979) makes similar claims about the cultural impact of the printing press, noting, for example, that print popularized the modern, industrial notion of the standard; manuscripts are all individual handcrafted items, but a printed book has the exact same content on the exact same pages regardless of which copy we might look at.
This is media ecology in a nutshell. Every communication device we use, whether it is electric like radio, whether it is physically mechanical like a phonograph, or whether it is an immaterial technology like language, has built-in affordances and limitations. My iPod is very good for playing SpellTower (Zach Gage, 2011), but it is less useful for a big-screen display of an epic movie. These inclinations, however, have cultural implications; once a culture really becomes literate, there is far less need to memorize information.
The observations, however, stretch beyond a single medium. Although the technological basis of radio in the US did not change significantly between 1945 and 1955, the introduction of national television networks significantly transformed the older medium. Any proper media ecology analysis of communication technology looks at the entire media environment in which a given medium operates (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988; Mumford, 1966; Postman, 1993).
The Critiques
Even the most carefully researched pieces of media ecology scholarship, however, are sometimes panned for being technologically determinist. Typically, critics worry about political implications of such a move. Like a Transformers movie, technological determinism reduces humans to bit players in a drama about machines. If humans have so little agency, why would we bother to try to change things for the better? To a critic of technological determinism, both pessimistic media ecologists such as Jacques Ellul (1964) and mass media cheerleaders such as the pop icon version of McLuhan (1964) play into a narrative that reinscribes and naturalizes the cultural hegemony of the class-based interests of the captains of digital industries and the representatives of Progress (Williams, [1974] 1992).
Political issues aside, there are good reasons to question the accuracy of technologically determinist accounts (see, for example, Finnegan, 1988). Humans have a funny tendency to do just what we don’t expect with a given item (e.g. Hall, 1999; Fiske, 1987). If the same tool can be used in very different and unexpected ways, does that not demonstrate that something other than the technology is responsible for this or that feature of culture (Bijker, 1995)? Certainly the relatively brief history of video games seems to prove the tremendous flexibility of digital media: the same computer that can run an emulation of the Atari 2600 version of Pitfall! (Activision, 1982) can also allow us to play the classic text adventure Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Infocom, 1984), the real-time strategy game Starcraft II (Blizzard, 2010), and the MMO (massively multiplayer online game) Star Wars: The Old Republic (Bioware, 2011). And this doesn’t begin to tap into the tremendous variety of play-styles and cultures built around these games. How can we look at such a diverse body of work and their uses and identify what the technology is responsible for?
In a somewhat similar vein of critique, some scholars believe that when researching a transmedial phenomenon such as video games, it doesn’t make much sense to pay attention to the technological platforms at all (Aarseth, 2004). We can play the exact same version of Pac-Man (Midway, 1980) on many different kinds of digital devices. Surely it is the form that ties these different cybertexts together, rather than the technology? Does it make much sense to talk about a video game medium, let alone the video game medium, as Mark Wolf does (2001)?
Even scholars who think the materiality of our communication technology is important will argue that media ecology can easily veer into overgeneralizations. Lisa Gitelman (2008) argues that any analysis of the impact of a technology must look at specific contexts—generalizing from a few specific cases will almost certainly lead to mistaken predictions and analysis in a different situation. The technology of the NES had the impact it did because of the experience of Atari, the Great Crash of 1983, and the relationship between Japanese and American cultures, to name a few factors; none of these will ever be exactly replicated again.
(Re?)Defining Media Ecology
These critical arguments are all legitimate concerns, but they don’t invalidate the media ecology perspective—they simply force us to clarify and recognize some limitations. For example, Gitelman’s concern about specificity is a good one, but it replays the eternal debate in the social sciences and humanities about the worth of making general observations about anything to do with culture. The fact is that in some senses, every geographic location, social group, and moment in history is unique. Yet, there are also forces, symbols, and structures that carry over from one situation to the next: if not, we would be caught in a kind of historical solipsism, in which each context would have meaning only for itself.
Postman (1985), for instance, argued that television turned everything into entertainment. As an absolute statement, this was and is an overgeneralization: the small screen can be sober, boring, and intelligent, as Postman himself noted. Yet he was on to something: broadcast video does not have limitless expressive capabilities, and it is certainly easier for it to do some tasks than others. Television as a technology certainly is well suited to the kind of personality-driven, hyper-motion gameshow/MTV style Postman feared was taking over other parts of life—better suited to do this than, say, print. That televisual facility for flashy moving images and character-oriented communication carries over to other contexts, whether it is used or not.
The key is not to talk about the cultural impact of media as if we were identifying absolute rules that will produce guaranteed results, but instead to talk about tendencies. This is why the concept of media bias is useful. A bias is not impossible to overcome—rather, it’s an inclination.
Part of the reason media bias is a tendency rather than a rule has to do with the socially-constructed nature of technology. The fact is that media ecology does not require a simplistic understanding of communication tools. It is quite clear that technology has significant malleability, which is unsurprising, given that people make it and use it. I can, in fact, use my iPod to watch a movie meant for the big screen, and I can use an Xbox game controller for a nongame application. The purposes and use of any given technology is defined by the groups of people that are most concerned with it, as Wiebe Bijker (1995) points out in his in-depth history Of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs.
Yet these same theorists note that technologies are not entirely flexible in their meaning and function. For one thing, technologies have a material reality that can’t be wished away. Even supposedly immaterial technologies such as software code reside on physical disks and move through physical wires—Mia Consalvo’s (2008) analysis of lag in online games is a good example of how that physical reality matters. For another, even beyond the physical reality of a device or strategy, there comes a point where the social understanding of a technology stabilizes and loses (in Bijker’s terms) its “interpretative flexibility.” Once the handheld console is a well-understood and widely accepted concept, it is hard to do something very different with it. Not impossible—as the Nintendo DS’s two screens illustrates—but difficult. In other words, while technologies are very much the creation of people, they are not completely fluid. They have built-in and culturally constructed limitations and abilities that can be difficult to ignore.
Given all this, in the Actor–Network Theory he has developed, Latour (2005) argues that sociology of technology should accord machines the status of actors. That is, devices are non-human social forces: the physical technologies themselves impact social structures and interaction, albeit in a different manner than humans.
But can we even talk about a “video game medium” as a singular thing? Should we lump together games and game machines, forms and machines? I like Gitelman’s take:
I define media as socially realized structures of communication, where structure include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation.
(2008, p. 7)
A medium is not an inert machine all by itself—without a familiarity with moving-image conventions and without the system of broadcast and the bureaucracies that make that possible, television would not really communicate.
That still leaves a lot of room for discretion: we could talk about the computer as a medium, or we could define a particular kind of computerized communication, such as video games, as a medium. I think these are all potentially useful, but for my part, when I’m talking about the video game medium, following Gitelman’s definition, I would include the devices used to play video games (recognizing that many, if not most of these devices, such as PCs, are often more than video game machines), the institutions, organizations, and delivery systems necessary to make those games available and working, and the culturally constructed understandings of the video game form. For Pac-Man or Fallout: New Vegas (Obsidian Entertainment, 2010) to be meaningful, we need a machine, enabling systems for that machine, and a tradition of understanding. Of course, we could study each of these three elements in isolation. The medium, however, as the “socially realized structure of communication,” is where all three of these elements come together.
In short, media ecology argues that the media we use form a kind of communicative landscape, setting, or environment within which our communication occurs. That environment is composed of physical and non-physical technologies, technologies that have non-human components, yet are still socially created and maintained; the environment can change and does change. Finally, our media landscape does not strictly determine our activities. To use the metaphor of the physical environment, there are an awful lot of different things you can do on an open hillside, but it does influence the way things move. It takes less effort to go down a hill than up it, just as it’s easier to use a game controller to play a game than to control the playback of a DVD.
A Brief Consideration of the Media Ecology of the Video Game
Because the video game medium is so complex and constantly shifting, it is hazardous, as Gitelman and others note, to generalize about it. But video games do have certain key features that hold true across different contexts. For instance, they are all computerized (or, in a few of the earliest video games, used transistors for a similar kind of electronic logic), screen-based, and require active user participation. In my own work, I have continued to run across three key characteristics of video games: playable systems, automation, and transmedial emulation.
As many game studies scholars have noted, all games are playable systems of rules (see, for example Salen & Zimmerman, 2004; Juul, 2005). They are more than this, but they are not less. We can represent games as a series of if-then statements (if I press “A,” then I shoot), even if the social interactions of players, the attached and integrated narratives, and the cultural meanings invoked by the game are usually not so neat and tidy. Whether the player notes it or not, the game cannot do without the if-then series of events. This systematic characteristic of the game form is then further reinforced in the video game medium by the procedurality of computers (Bogost, 2007). All elements of a video game that a player actually uses or accesses must be functional code, or the game is likely unplayable or unwatchable.
On top of this, all video games employ extensive automation (Manovich, 2001). All machines augment human capacity, but computers allow for an unprecedented flexibility of human enhancements, and they allow for the automation of communication and other cultural activity. On a low level, computers can remove the need to physically process aspects of board games: playing the complicated board game Le Havre (Codito Development, 2012) on an iOS device eliminates the need to count and set up all the little pieces. But automation in video games can mimic human interaction—like the AI behaviors in Fallout: New Vegas that respond to simple stimuli such as aggressive behavior, territorial violation, or social reputation. And in complicated simulations, this mimicry can approach something like the behavior of actual humans and can produce unanticipated and unique cultural interactions, as evidenced by all the bugs and exploits gamers discover. Nonetheless, game automation is never fully human, and to this point usually doesn’t fool gamers (à la the Turing Test). In any case, whether it’s complex of not, all video games employ some automation.
The upshot of all this is the medium has a bias toward a kind of mechanization of culture. A video game may be full of free-flowing decoration, but it must have fully-defined elements that act according to a precisely-defined set of rules. Even if the very purpose of the game is some kind of creative activity, such as Draw Something (OMGPOP, 2012), the creation happens within the bounds of game rules and code. And even the most complex automation is, at base, a cultural phenomenon of coded cause-and-effect. It’s very true that machine–human interaction produces remarkable art and unpredictable culture, but computers still cannot act in the same way as humans.
Complicating this bias is the ability of video games to remediate other media. Computers can, of course, do audio, still and moving images, text, and haptic feedback (primitive as today’s vibrating controllers still are). Thus, all the communicative possibilities of previous media are part of the game maker’s toolbox. Video games can be movies, radio, books, theatre, and more. However, remediations are not the same thing as the original, even when they are apparently identical (Bolter & Grusin, 1999). An audio broadcast on a computer is not identical to the gramophone analog recording of the same sound, even if they both play the same hisses and crackles. And some media, such as books, must be modified substantially; a pageless manuscript on a non-retina class display cannot be the same as a real tome.
I would argue that this emulative capacity of video games allows for a great flexibility in communication, and clearly complicates the systematic bias of the medium. Cut-scenes with high production values, such as those produced by Blizzard in many of its games, demonstrate that video games can do what movies do. Text-based adventure games and other interactive fiction employ many of the same tools as novels. Social games are frequently tightly integrated with Facebook. Yet in every case, these emulations put imitations of different media in a new context, and they can’t entirely eliminate the mechanistic bias of video games.
A brief analysis like this is, in the end, a “probe,” in the McLuhanist sense—an exploration that requests a deeper engagement of today’s media environment. Clearly there is much more to be said about video games, and any media ecologist that tries to reduce the study of video games to a consideration of nothing more than technology is overreaching. But as part of the diverse intellectual toolbox available to game studies theorists, media ecology is a worthwhile perspective to engage.
References
Aarseth, E. (2004). Genre trouble: Narrativism and the art of simulation. In N. Wardrip-Fruin, & P. Harrigan (Eds.), First person: New media as story, performance, and game (pp. 45–55). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bijker, W. (1995). Of bicycles, Bakelites, and bulbs: Toward a theory of sociotechnical change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Carey, J. (1998). Marshall McLuhan: Genealogy and legacy. Canadian Journal of Communication, 23(3), 293–306.
Carpenter, E. (Ed.). (1960). Explorations in communication: An anthology. Boston: Beacon Press.
Consalvo, M. (2008). Lag, language, and lingo: Theorizing noise in online game spaces. In B. Perron, & M. J. P. Wolf (Eds.), The video game theory reader 2 (pp. 295–312). New York: Routledge.
Eisenstein, E. L. (1979). The printing press as an agent of change: Communications and cultural transformations in early-modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ellul, J. (1964). The technological society (J. Wilkinson Trans.). New York: Knopf.
Finnegan, R. H. (1988). Literacy and orality: Studies in the technology of communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fiske, J. (1987). Television culture. New York: Routledge.
Gitelman, L. (2008). Always already new: Media, history, and the data of culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Goody, J., & Watt, I. (1968). The consequences of literacy. In J. Goody (Ed.), Literacy in traditional societies (pp. 27–68). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, E. T. (1956/1990). The silent language. New York: Anchor Books.
Hall, S. (1999). Encoding/decoding. In P. Marris, & S. Thornham (Eds.), Media studies: A reader (pp. 51–61). New York: New York University Press.
Havelock, E. A. (1963/1967). Preface to Plato. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.
Innis, H. A. (1950/1972). Empire and communications. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Innis, H. A. (1951). The bias of communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Juul, J. (2005). Half-real: Video games between real rules and fictional worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor–Network Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Logan, R. (2000). The sixth language: Learning a living in the internet age. Toronto: Stoddart.
McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media. New York: McGraw-Hill.
McLuhan, M., & McLuhan, E. (1988). Laws of media: The new science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Meyrowitz, J. (1985). No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mumford, L. (1934). Technics and civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Mumford, L. (1966). The myth of the machine: Technics and human development. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Ong, W. J. (1967). The presence of the word: Some prolegomena for cultural and religious history. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Routledge.
Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death. New York: Elizabeth Sifton Books.
Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. New York: Vintage Books.
Rushkoff, D. (2010). Program or be programmed: Ten commands for a digital age. New York: OR Books.
Salen, K., & Zimmerman, E. (2004). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Williams, R. ([1974] 1992). Television: Technology and cultural form. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
Wolf, M. J. P. (2001). The video game as a medium. In M. J. P. Wolf (Ed.), The medium of the video game. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.