MAKING SENSE OF SOFTWAREby Ted Friedman
Copyright © 1993 by Ted Friedman. All rights reserved.
[1.] I should acknowledge one other strand of related cultural criticism: the cultural studies approach represented by the collection Technoculture, edited by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). But while individual essays in the collection, and in Ross's Strange Weather (New York: Verso, 1991), illuminate important aspects of high-tech society, nobody in cultural studies to my knowledge has yet directly engaged the semiotics of software.
Notes[2.] See George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). See also Paul Delany and George P. Landow, eds., Hypermedia and Literary Studies (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991).
[3.] This does not mean that computer game-playing is a transparent activity; far from it, as any hapless Nintendo novice can attest. Rather, like becoming teleliterate, learning how to play computer games is a process of learning a distinct semiotic structure. To some extent, this language, like that of Classical Hollywood narrative, carries over from one text to the next; initiates finish one game and can comfortably start to play on a new one. But in some ways, every new computer game is its own world, a distinct semiotic system, and it is the very process of learning (or conquering) that system which drives interest in the game. Every game typically requires a "learning curve" while the user grows familiar to the new interface and the logic of the program. It is when the game's processes appear transparent, when the player can easily win the game, that the game loses its appeal.
[4.] For more on cyberpunk and virtual reality, see Rudy Rucker, R.U. Sirius, and Queen Mu, Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992). See also Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), Benjamin Wooley, Virtual Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), and individual issues of Mondo 2000.
[5.] For a critical summary of the literature on video games and computer games in general, see David Myers, "A Q-Study of Game Player Aesthetics," Simulation & Gaming, December 1990, 21, 375-396. Myers, a Communications scholar, is one of the very few academics to write about the aesthetics and semiotics of computer games. His work synthesizes the anthropological field of "play theory" with semiotics and quantitative communications research. While his writing avoids the pitfalls of "uses and gratifications" oversimplification, its emphasis on quantative and symbolic analysis at the expense of critical exegesis makes it of limited use for those outside the social sciences. (See also Myers, "Computer Game Semiotics," Play and Culture, 1991, 4, 334-346, and Myers, "Time, Symbol Transformations, and Computer Games," Play and Culture, 1992, 5, 441-457.) When Myers isn't in number-crunching mode, he does provide a useful account of computer game aesthetics and the computer gamer subculture, although his theoretical framework remains disappointingly underdeveloped, slipping into vague invocations of "the...profound and ineffable mystery of simple human truths" (Myers, "Chris Crawford and Computer Game Aesthetics," Journal of Popular Culture, 1990, 24(2), 29. See also Myers, "Computer Game Genres," Play and Culture, 1990, 3, 286-301, and Myers, "The Patters on Player-Game Relationships: A Study of Computer Game Players," Simulations & Games, June 1984, 159-185.)
[6.] See Marsha Kinder, Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games (Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 1991). To some extent, Kinder's reliance on non-computer texts to explain Nintendo is justified by her conscious focus on the intertextuality of mass-produced childrens' culture. But given her own acknowledgement that Nintendo games are more important to many children than TV or movies, looking for meanings in those peripheral texts only begs the most important questions about kids' relations to contemporary media.
[7.] Sara Reeder, "Silly Parent, Carts are for Kids!," Computer Gaming World, November 1992, p. 130
[8.] "Maxis Software Toys Catalog" (Orinda, CA: Maxis, 1992), p. 4.
[9.] "Maxis Software Toys Catalog," p. 10.
[10.] Orson Scott Card, "Gameplay," Compute, February, 1991, p. 54.
[11.] Chris Crawford, Balance of Power: International Politics as the Ultimate Global Game, 1986, p. 191, quoted in Myers, "Chris Crawford and Computer Game Aesthetics," 27.
[12.] Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design, 1984, p. 60, quoted in Myers, "Chris Crawford and Computer Game Aesthetics," 33.
[13.] Card, "Gameplay," Compute, March 1991, p. 58.
[14.] Pournelle, Jerry, Untitled column, Byte, February, 1990.
[15.] Myers, "Chris Crawford and Computer Game Aesthetics," 27. Quote from Crawford, Balance of Power, p. 16.
[16.] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 206.
[17.] Harvey, p. 206.
[18.] Fredrick Jameson, Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 54.
[19.] Jameson, p. 51.
[20.] Jameson, p. 253.
[21.] Jameson, pp. 51-52.
[22.] Myers, "Chris Crawford and Computer Game Aesthetics," 27. Quote from Crawford, Balance of Power, p. 15.
[23.] This phenomenon is almost universally noted by those writing about computer games. As Myers writes, "from personal experience and interviews with other players, I can say it is very common to play these games for 8 or more hours without pause, usually through the entire first night of purchase" (Myers, "Computer Game Semiotics," 343).
[24.] This experience strikes me as a postmodern variant of what Mark Seltzer in Bodies and Machines describes as the emergence at the turn of the century of the "body-machine complex" -- an account of subjectivity viewing the self as an extension of the machine, and the machine as a prosthetic extension of the self. SimCity seems an example of an emergent "body-computer complex," in which the pleasure of decision- making lies in one's sense of being an organic extension of the computer's processing of information. See Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992).
[25.] Harvey, pp. 245, 246 (caption), 258-259.