It is an entirely reasonable question: there are any number of learning theories and educational practices out there; why should we look to electronic games?
One of the more influential theoretical constructs for examining the historical development of media technologies and the impact of media innovation has been Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) Remediation: Understanding new media [1]. Bolter and Grusin identify a “double logic of remediation” that has structured the development of media technologies: all media do their work in the midst of a tension between a desire for immediacy, on the one hand, and hypermediacy on the other. Western culture has throughout its history manifested an ongoing desire to make the medium of representation disappear, to create the powerful experience of touching the world directly (photorealism in painting, virtual reality technologies, etc.). At the same time, Western culture has celebrated and cultivated a proliferation of media forms and given rise to works that demand participants recognize the mediated nature of the representation (the play within a play, for example, or the web version of a newspaper that incorporates numerous media formats). These strategies, the authors note, are complementary and driven by the same desire:
the desire to get past the limits of representation and to achieve the real. They are not striving for the real in any metaphysical sense. Instead, the real is defined in terms of the viewer’s experience, it is that which would evoke an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response. Transparent digital applications seek to get to the real by bravely denying the fact of mediation; digital hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality. (p. 53)
It is important to note that Bolter and Grusin’s discussion of media is constrained in several critical ways by its reliance upon a notion of mediation that is tied to representation. In the above quote, for example, the emphasis upon the “viewer” of media positions the individual in an essentially passive relationship to a preexisting, fixed media product. As a result, their discussion of electronic games is rudimentary at best; games are understood to be driven primarily by a desire to achieve a visual authenticity by remediating cinema. What is missing from their account is an understanding that electronic games are never simply about looking but about doing; indeed, an obsession with appearance over functional gameplay has earned many a visually spectacular title a short trip to the Land of Remainderware. Bolter and Grusin’s work thus represents a continuation of a trend in which, as Gonzalo Frasca observed, a behavioral mechanism for understanding our engagement with new media—simulation—becomes subordinate to a more traditional approach that emphasizes watching—representation [2]. For that reason a more useful way of inflecting Bolter and Grusin’s argument would be to replace the term “viewer” for example with “participant" [3].
Nevertheless, the fact that Bolter and Grusin do locate the criteria for understanding the effects of media in the viewer/participant rather than in the work itself has meant their analysis has found ready application in a number of areas of media studies. In a gaming context, for example, the immediacy/hypermediacy tension has been useful for understanding the contribution of a game’s visuals to a player’s sense of immersion. However, the applicability of their argument has been limited by two factors, one a misapplication of their central argument, the second a limitation of the argument itself. Use of their work has often been shaped by a generic cultural/critical bias toward seeing media in evolutionary, progressive terms; this has meant that remediation has been treated as a strategy used by new media as they incorporate older media. However, the authors themselves emphasize that remediation works both ways:
No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other social and economic forces. What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media. (p. 15)
For example, the modern television broadcast remediates both digital graphics and the web as it incorporates features such as running tickers, embedded media, a graphic style that incorporates “menu” bars, and so on (p. 48).
The more serious limitation, in a way, has been Bolter and Grusin’s attempt to differentiate their work from what is perhaps its most obvious application: an understanding of more general processes of adaptation. Adaptation, they argue, is where the plot of a work in one form is represented in another but no reference is made to its original medium; remediation, on the other hand, is “the representation of one medium in another” (p. 44). On the face of it this seems like an unnecessarily restrictive distinction and one that is more than a little arbitrary. Our everyday sense of “adaptation” for example involves much more than simply replicating one aspect of content; rather it tends to involve also the idea of imitating, modifying and/or replicating behaviors: we adapt to a new environment, we adapt tools and lessons from one situation to another, and so on.
The reason for the restrictive nature of this on Bolter and Grusin’s part is of course their reliance on representation as a framework for understanding our relationship to media. But it also speaks to an unrealized potential in their work, one that is underscored by Ian Bogost (2006) [4]. Bogost's aim is to outline the largely unnoticed parallels between the fields of literary criticism and computer programming. Key to understanding this connection is the idea of "units" that encapsulate functionalities. For example, he locates a paradigm shift in computing in the transition to object-oriented program languages: such languages create chunks of code that represent a virtual object that carries with it specific sets of behaviors and rules for interacting with other objects. This facilitates such design and programming principles as modularity, reusability, portability, etc. But this idea of the "object" (or unit, in Bogost's terms) is not restricted to the world of programming. Thus he points out that in Bolter and Grusin's work the idea of remediation is not restricted to the purely formal properties or technological capabilities of various media. Rather, what is remediated is often functionalities. Product licensing, for example, "is not an information technology in the usual sense, but it does exhibit the same unit operations of legal right and instantiation as object technology. . . .Licensing is an example of the fungible use of a unit operation in the cultural, commercial, and legal registers" (p. 42).
An analysis of the starter city and starter zone concepts in MMORPGs indicates that a central aspect of their design has been the remediation of a variety of learning functionalities. Some of these have been adapted directly from the practices of existing school structures. However, as Gee makes clear, many of them have not—because the learning strategies employed by games actually work. It is time, therefore, that we in the official learning game employed remediation in our own right and began to adapt some of the functionalities from games. In order to do so, however, we will need to embrace the idea that if people can learn to play, then it is quite acceptable for them to play to learn.
1. Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
2. Gonzalo Frasca is a prominent local official in the city of Simulata.
3. This has the added advantage of prompting us to notice that representation itself has always been in part a behavioral category. Watch the way in which participants in a gallery engage with a painting, for example: moving from side to side, stepping back, coming up as close as security will allow, scrutinizing the brush work, trying to eliminate the annoying reflection from a bad lighting scheme, walking away to look at the painting next door, coming back. The same is true of traditional photographs: participants will bring the image close to scrutinize a detail, turn it to appreciate some of its odd angles, exchange it with someone else then snatch it back, etc. Seeing representation itself as incorporating a behavioral component both reduces some of the gap (made to appear more of a chasm in Frasca’s work) between representative and simulative depiction of the world, and establishes more of a continuity of participant involvement between older representative practices and newer practices such as fan communities, blogging, fan conventions, and so on.
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