This chapter is a translation of a small book on the topic of computer games issued as one of only two academic monographs on the topic in Germany in 2002, therefore it has both historical as well as theoretical value as it is an early attempt at a theory of computer games as a medium sui generis in German academia. Applying phenomenological, semiotic and psychoanalytic approaches, this part is very much influenced by a specific kind of German media theory that was, and remains, interested in the āmaterialities of communicationā, i.e. the medium itself. This perspective today is very well known outside Germany too, as a blend of philosophy, philology and a fascination with all things technical. āPhilosophyā in this case means continental philosophy.
Introduction
āWhere the Game Ends and Reality Beginsā
A computer game released recently in the USA was promoted by its developers in the following way:
You only use 12% of your brain. Mind if we play with the rest? Welcome to Majestic, the suspense thriller that infiltrates your life and leaves you guessing where the game ends and reality begins. Majestic is an episodic online entertainment experience set against the backdrop of a grand and sinister conspiracyāan unfolding mystery adventure that uses the Internet as a canvas for its story, weaving you through both real and fictional experiences in real time. Highly personalized and naturally paced, Majestic tailors your experience specifically to you as it dynamically changes the content of Web pages, emails, faxes, voice mails and chat conversations in order to immerse each player at the very heart of a developing story. Majestic players assume the leading role in their own adventure, interacting with other characters, uncovering clues, searching for answers, collecting and using digital objects and resolving challenges to progress through the experience. Unlike other forms of entertainment, Majestic actively pursues and interacts with you based on events developing within the fiction, creating a uniquely suspenseful entertainment experience .1
The in-game content of Majestic revolves around a plot whose subject is an international conspiracy. It might, at first glance, be categorized under the āadventureā genre.2 What differentiates it from conventional computer games is that we are no longer dealing, in this game, with software installed locally, available for purchase in a shop, and offering an enclosed virtual space of play. Its interfaces are the real communication methods of the digital age : from chat rooms to Internet forums to communications sent by email or mobile phone. For a monthly fee, the player is given tasks and is passed the alleged clues of a conspiracy over the anonymous channels of the World Wide Web. These are spread either by real actors or by intelligent ābotsā.3 The goal is to create an atmosphere as real and as paranoid as possible, in which the borderlines between fiction and reality are increasingly blurred. This thrill is the real content of the game .
Following the events of 11 September 2001, with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and other sites, the publisher Electronic Arts considered itself obliged to delay the release of the game Majestic indefinitely because, in the game, references to terrorist organizations operating on a global scale are the predominant theme. Because the fictitious news reports within the context of the game made use of the same communications channels as did ārealā news distributors, the perceived difference between a staged event within the framework of the game and the broadcast of a catastrophe on CNN was so blurred that Electronic Arts considered the continuation of Majestic unacceptable.
The causes for this ought not simply to have been the shock of 9/11 and related, understandable, reasons of respect. What was truly unsettling ought to have been the perceived reversal and shaking up of the relationship between reality and fiction, conventionally assumed to be dichotomous. While the terrorists had, during a time of technological upgrade, with nothing more than a pair of box-cutters and crumpled airplane manuals in their bags, aimed not so much at real people but at connotatively loaded signs (the World Trade Center and the Pentagon being the symbols of a despised Americanism), and with their destruction had so deeply shaken the West as had scarcely any other event since the 1940s, Majestic pushed its way into the real everyday life of its players as a fictitious scenario. And so, as reality obtained its most brutal entrance into the symbolic field of Western high capitalism, the developers of Majestic became aware of the dramatic scope of their seemingly harmless project by means of its exact mirror image . If fiction has come far enough to reach into the real life of the player and the real, to make itself heard, can reach its furthest magnitude only through entering into the symbolic field, the much-invoked āagony of the realā has entered a stage that calls urgently for new reflection.
It is no accident that this example owes its clarity to the comparison with a video game. Key terms such as āderealizationā, āaestheticizationā, āloss of reality ā or indeed āthe agony of the realā are set to work in phenomena that conspire together in concentrated form in the medium of the video game , making it a rewarding field of analysis. Curiously enough, this medium is either largely ignored within media-theoretical discussions, or is perceived only as a peripheral phenomenon.
While the scientific confrontation with the medium of the video game is limited to a few, predominantly US, contributions, mostly as āuses and gratificationsā and āstimulusāresponseā analyses, a curious silence surrounds this phenomenon within culturalātheoretical media discussions. This is surprising, considering that a concrete analysis of this medium as a medium could yield information about concepts such as virtuality, derealization or perception in the age of digitalization . Such key terms are commonly used, but only in a very diffused way in the public discussion about ānew media ā, and rarely with methodical reflection. The description of a concrete phenomenon such as the video game could, as a kind of side-effect, lend this terminology greater clarity.
An investigation of the phenomenon of āvirtual reality ā, however, is in no way lacking in the growing literature on the subject of media theory over recent years.4 What is surprising is the fact that, in all the talk of humanāmachine systems, data suits , disembodiment or the plunge into virtual worlds , mainly abstract concepts of this āvirtual reality ā, as depicted in the novels of William Gibson (Neuromancer) or in the concepts of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration agency (NASA), are drawn upon as standards for comparison; models which are not yet realized, are not yet available to the wider public, or which belong entirely to the world of science fiction. Yet there is no need to look so far afield, for the phenomena in question here are already reality in the medium of the video game , and they can be found as near to us as the closest Gameboy-playing child.
Aestheticization and the Dissolution of Reality
The broad disregard for the medium of the video game within culturalāacademic discourse has, we may surmise, many reasons. For one, a relevant, specialized knowledge of the object is to a large extent absent. The sheer mass of electronic entertainment software , and of its genres, forms and technical developments , has become impossible to survey. There is, moreover, the extremely accelerated development of hardware, leading to the situation that contemporary video games of recent release share only basic fundamental characteristics with their predecessors, even if the latter might be only five years older, and that the contents and forms of presentation can change radically, when we also consider the introduction of larger and larger storage media within a short time period.
Furthermore, there is a certain resentment directed towards the field of investigation represented by electronic entertainment software , arising from the āpredominance of the economic over aesthetics in the area of mass media ā.5 This circumstance emerges with particular distinction, of course, in the field of video games , wh...