Abstract

Because the form of any given archive structures its effects and content, changing methods of knowledge preservation and dissemination demand particular attention. In October of 2006, the MacArthur foundation announced a $240,000 grant given to the University of Indiana to create a massively multiplayer online game, Arden: The World of Shakespeare. Given that the MacArthur foundation’s purpose is to “investigate the role and impact of digital media and technology, and to seek out the implications on our schools, institutions, families, and democracy,” one has to wonder how creating an immersive Shakespeare world fosters this goal. On the one hand, this project would appear to be nothing specifically new: historical re-enactments and recreations have long been a part of how public memory is created and preserved. But on the other hand, the digitalization of this type of historical re-presentation points to a differently framed set of concerns: What do we preserve? How much agency should “players” have? And, perhaps most importantly and given the increasing fascination with such a projected world, what role do these simulations have in the construction of a public memory? For, if one can re-create the literary world of Shakespeare, are we really that far from Surviving in Auschwitz: the online game? And if these types of games seem almost inevitable, what are the broader effects of such simulation-representations on how we archive knowledge?

Full Proposal

We could understand the recent increase in historical simulations (the McArthur foundation grant serves as the premier example, but one could also include Escape from Woomera, Survivor 9/11, JFK Reloaded, or the recently controversial CSuper Columbine Massacre RPG!, a game based on the iconic school shootings at the Colorado school) as simply an incarnation of archival fever: the way in which the archive seeks to capture and preserve all of human knowledge. Yet as the structure of the archive changes, as the technological supports which frame a particular way of presenting and preserving knowledge changes, the content of the archive–and our encounter with said content–also changes. As Ian Bogost suggests in Unit Operations, this new archival format represents a specific form of “archive fever,” one he recasts simulation fever: the belief that all knowledge can be represented if one merely develops an adequate simulation.

The ubiquity of digital games is no longer a contestable issue. Once marginal “geek” culture, digital game sales in the United States now out pace box office receipts. In teaching, I have learned that I can rely far more upon shared digital game references than common television viewing habits; and even while traveling in Burma, I discovered that one ninth-grader’s attraction to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was based on his having played Grand Theft Auto.

Despite their dominating presence, however, this textual medium is just now becoming the focus of scholarship. To be sure, one can find sociological media studies, especially given recent claims of video-game-inspired violence, in debate over the effects of video games on youth, and the danger of this new medium. But these debates simply replay old “media frenzy” discussion about the corrupting nature of the novel, of film, or of television. Even scholarship which claims to take digital games as its starting point often relies on prior theoretical models to explicate these texts, fluctuating somewhere between “the sky is falling” techno-phobia and techno-determinist analysis of the digital game as harbinger of techno-utopia. Unfortunately, little scholarship has addressesed the specificity of this medium while still attempting to understand it within a larger framework of media, technology and the archivization of knowledge.

As the medium becomes more mature, and as computing power increases, the demand for such scholarship only increases. Digital games have gained the ability to render more complex simulations, and, perhaps more importantly, have become increasingly “serious.” In the past few years, a range of titles have become available which claim to function as historical representation. This is not a particuarly new idea: one of the first digital games I can recall playing extensively was Oregon Trail (designed to recreate the difficulty in traveling by wagon from St. Louis to Oregon, it is played by many in elementary schools). Yet the increase in historical simulation is evidence of a trend that is not only limited to the digital game: documentary films, living history museums, and historical novels all rely on similar modes of dissemination.

In Archive Fever, Derrida claims,“The archivization produces as much as it records the event” (17). That is, the way in which we archive information–in his words, “the technical structure of the archiving archive”–determines the content of what information we are able to store. While Aristotelian logic, and for the most part Western philosophy, treats technological “form” as separate from human “content,” Derrida’s analysis shows how the technological can never be thought separate from the human. This is not Ong’s techno-determinism: a telos of progression in our relation to the technological whereby the technological determines the human. Rather, Derrida offers an approach which considers how the technological and the human can never be thought of as wholly separate: they must be thought of as mutually implicated terms.

Following Derrida, then, the human is always defined by the technological or the prosthetic, but the prosthetic is always in turn defined by the human. This analysis is not simply limited to what we typically think of as technical objects–computers, automobiles, refrigerators–but extends “all the way down” to language, and thus our relation to the way we archive knowledge. The interiority of the human psyche cannot be thought of as separate from the technics used to conceive of this interiority. As Derrida summarizes, “what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way.”(18) For, when we have new technology, we have new ways of thinking, and thus a new way of thinking the human.

This means that we are obliged to consider even the prosthetic of memory. Cultural memory shifts: not only our remembering, but the ways in which we form these rememberings. This is why the question of the replayable digital archive seems so pressing. As we access knowledge through more complicated, but still programmed, means, how has our relation to the index of historical and social information changed the way in which we know it?

If one pays careful attention to media representations, one can already sense these effects beginning to take place. Digital games reposition how the viewer encounters the event, not because they are any more or less interactive (interactivity fails to garner any traction in this analysis), but rather because simulations suggest that the event is not only something which can be repeated, but something which ought to be replayed and reconfigured. Placing before its reader a multiplicity of options, a replayable archive has two effects. On the one hand, the reader must order the events, create a unique chronos of the events. On the other hand, s/he must recognize that this ordering is at every moment arbitrary.

Digital games therefore offer a form of representation which incapsulates a new form of time. While other mediums might refigure our notion of space and time–indeed, representation in general works this way–by working across different contexts, different moments in time and space, simulations suggest, and digital simulations allow, for the idea that these events can be replayed and reconfigured in radically different ways: that time itself is contingent. At each moment, the reader/player is made aware that there is a range of other historical and future possibilities enabled not only by him/herself, but by the text as well.

This is why the notion of historical video games is so unsettling (and why, for example, the Woomera game and the Colombine game have been the subject of rather sharp critiques): it disturbs the notion of place and, simultaneously, and disturbs our notion of time, chopping it up, recasting it, allowing time to be experienced and represented independent of its perceived causal links. The concluding effect is that representation itself is unsettled.

This doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that these simulations provide more freedom. In one sense, there is less freedom, for to design a simulation requires an increasingly lengthy “rule” set, a list of operations which frame and contextualize the experience. Yet this paradox, too, reveals a certain failure to represent; while the simulation might be informed by a desire to represent the event–not only what happened, but what might have happened–the simulation always fall short, is just another instance of ideologically informed artistic works. And, although simulation might appear to give one the most “real” representation of the events (you can live as a character in Shakespeare’s time, learn what it is really like), they are still themselves informed by borders, rules, contextual frames, which inform the ability to encounter this type of archivization. As Bogost suggests, what this new moment calls for is “a body of criticism for simulations that relate their rules to their subjective experiences and configurations” (109).

Articulating such a “body of criticism” seems increasingly difficult in a print based medium, or a single author based work. A text-based medium (such as a codex book) would already restrict representation and discursive exploration to a certain linearity which is called into question by the medium itself. This is why I propose this work should begin in Media Commons, both for practical and theoretical reasons. In the practical sense, any understanding of historical simulations needs to be informed by a wide range of encounters with these works, a range of playing “styles.” For, if one of the crucial questions here is the ability of these works to recast events in multiple playings, in order that that range of rules, possibilities and encounters is more adequately explored, not only multiple playings, but multiple players are required. While this is perhaps true of novels (one needs multiple readers to have a discourse about the variations of possible readings), this is even more the case with digital games, and any analysis needs to be informed by discourse about the textual event from a range of subject positions, playing strategies, and experiences. (From a practical sense, as well, these simulations are often so large that they require multiple readings and readers.) I envision this discourse not only in the form of textual conversation, but image and video captures of the game play experience: examples of what simulations players have experienced as well as their relation to history, to the ways in which the rules that govern the playings are negotiated, and how players make use of the technology.

In terms of the central “paper,” I want to seek a way to use digital presentation to embody the archival principle being discussed: to not only exploit the ability of hypertext to increase contextualization and possible pathways for engagement, but to develop the argument itself out of a replayability, a structure which highlights multiple readings and renderings. Any model of knowledge derived from this analysis I want to be in the form of this media: to have a replayability not necessarily available in the analog. The point, that is to say, is to reflect archive in such a way that rhetorically uses the moment of archive being discussed.

Bibliography
Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations : An Approach to Videogame Criticism, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, 1st ed ed., New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media, 1st MIT Press pbk. ed ed., Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002.
Weber, Samuel, and Alan Cholodenko. Mass Mediauras : Form, Technics, Media, Sydney: Power Publications, 1996.

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