TECHNOLOGY IN
PRACTICE
Question Answered: #2
Do what are
described as ‘new media’ technologies entail ‘new theory’ to account for their
possible effects? Describe the extent to which ideas of the ‘posthuman’ inform
this debate.
Early studies into communications systems centred upon the transmission models developed by Lasswell
(1948) and Shannon and Weaver (1949), which positioned message senders and
recipients in relation to a medium enabling communication. Messages, consisting
of signs operating within a language of connotation, are encoded onto a medium
by a sender to provoke specific ‘meaning’ when successfully decoded by the
recipient. Encoding is informed not only by the intention of the sender, but
also by the nature of the medium. In a manner akin to Norbert Weiner’s (1948) conception
of cybernetic machines, the unsuccessful receipt of messages, manifesting as
noise, is accommodated by the system in order to improve the chances of
successful communication. Existing as both a linguistic (semantic) process and
a material instantiation, media of transmission thus involves both the
technological and the institutional within themselves. Robert Babe (2000)
recognizes this duality as reflecting a distinction between the arts (cultural
studies) and the social sciences (political economy) (18-19). Conceptions of media originating with Stuart Hall begin to
displace these earlier models. Hall’s concern was to expand the potential for
agency on the part of message recipients (audiences). Audiences were not
passive vessels into which the content of communications processes was poured.
Hall argues that the traditional conception of the communication process as a loop
is limited due to the linear simplicity of its constituent feedback systems. Instead,
he offers a model, based in Marx’s Grundrisse
and in Capital, which conceives
of communication as a “process in terms of a structure produced and sustained
through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments – production, circulation,
distribution/consumption, reproduction.” (1980 128). Hierarchies of meaning relative
to what Hall calls the “dominant cultural order” may be invoked at each stage
in this process, and are neither “univocal nor uncontested” (134). Thus, the
process of communication between sender and audience involves a discursive
relationship in which the decoding or reception of an encoded message is a spectrum
of consensus which provokes “social practices if the circuit is to be both
completed and effective.” Reception of a message, therefore, involves
performative rules “which seek actively to enforce
or pre-fer one semantic domain over
another” (134). Hall’s examination of television in “Encoding/Decoding” (1980) illustrates
this idea. While institutional structures inform the production of television
shows, the system of audience ratings foundational to commercial television
serves to position the audience within a hierarchy of relational strategies
which both enable and disable the degree of agency they can express within this
system.
Fundamentally, ‘new media’ challenge older conceptions
of media due to the technologies which enable them. Old media can be understood
to adhere to older understandings (i.e., theory) of their operation for the
simple reason that such understandings reflected the technologies which enabled
them. Print and broadcast media are both defined by the systems which create
and distribute their ‘content’. Printing is a physical configuration of
equipment for (re)production whose demands – for example, capital to purchase printers
and the space necessary for their operation, the size and weight of the
machinery itself – orient the medium around a hegemony of interests which can
be understood as ‘sender’. Likewise, the cost of ‘content’ creation for
broadcast media such as radio and television orients these media around sites
of production and reception, whose “crucial ratio between them” will foster,
according to Richard Dienst, “intense competition between interests,
sometimes of outright class struggle” (1994 7). The printing (or broadcasting)
house can be controlled, manipulated, and censored by means of the discretion
and the interaction of these interests. The technical
nature of these media (specifically, the exact manner in which electromagnetic
frequency modulation is exploited to produce a signal which may be received)
further substantiates the transmission model for communications media. New
media, on the other hand, can be seen to fundamentally alter the manner in
which sites of (re)production come to alter and inform the significations
produced through communication (i.e., the ‘meaning’ of the message). Social
media – as well as redeployments of ‘old’ media such as television and film –
as enabled by digital mobile telephony signals a relocation of the printing
house, as it were, into the site of media reception. The relocation alters the
ontology of any notion of subjectivity, itself admittedly undermined by
post-structural theories which do not figure ‘subjects’ to be either unified or
coherent entities.
Video and computer games signal the most obvious need to develop the
critical tradition in a manner not fully anticipated by older models of
communication theory. Most importantly, the relationship between game
designers, players, and games does not fully accord with models centred upon
sender, receiver, and medium. Despite this fact, it is possible to trace a
continuation of the distinction in the study of media into humanistic and
empirical methodological approaches in contemporary criticism of videogames. The
ontology of digital gaming centres on a player’s performance of a role as
represented by their screen avatar (Waggoner 2009), regardless of whether or
not this performance is explicitly rendered into a narrative (Galloway 2006,
Aarseth 1997), within behavioural rules imposed by the game designers (Barr et
al 2007). This process of player anticipation of the roles expected with the
game is described as ritualistic by Gazzard and Peacock (2011) and others
(Harviainen 2012, Harviainen & Lieberoth 2012). Depending on the nature of
a particular game, this role can be as simple as staying “alive” or performing
some other task abstracting the will of the player into the procedural confines
of the game mechanics, or it can involve participating within a broad fictional
narrative. In this latter instance, a good game can be defined as one in which
both the game mechanics and the story are loved more or less equally. This
relationship is inherent to every game, whether the avatar signifies an
individual agent (a character or vehicle) or a function or process wherein the
avatar is the game interface itself (strategy, puzzle games). As a hybrid
between the interface for interaction with the medium and the principle site
for the generation of player affect, the avatar is the means for
instrumentalising the player’s will at the same time as it is itself often an
object for the player’s affections (Wolfendale 2007). Simultaneously illusion,
instrument, and interface, the avatar conflates the various conceptions of
representation in digital media as defined by Lev Manovich (2001). It is in the
capacity of information to be figured as an embodied virtuality that videogames
and other ‘new media’ can be rationalized. Videogames are thus ultimately
defined by player agency, which is itself determined by the spectrum of
possible player activities allowed by the set of rules governing the activities
made possible by a game world and the procedural interactions thus allowed and
provoked. Indeed, the very nature of videogames as an interactive,
computationally-bound medium ensures that players contribute to the significations
generated by a game. However, this agency must be understood with the proper
perspective. While the capacity for agency differs between games as player
activity is restricted relative to the game rules, the affect which players
feel toward the game world reflects their capacity to inflict their will upon
it in a manner contingent with the
procedural logic established by the game’s fiction and understood within the
technological limitations which enable a game. Arguably, the ‘message’ of a
game play event is not the ‘meaning’ of the event, but rather the affect
produced in and among players.
In this capacity, it is easy for critics schooled in the close reading
strategies typical of ‘old media’ to be misled by the superficial content
depicted in videogames. ‘Violent’ videogames such as the
Grand Theft Auto and
Doom
franchises, for example, are often condemned for the nature of the actions
available to players.
[i]
While such criticism often implicates ‘violent’ games in the social problems they
depict by desensitising audiences to actions contingent with those problems, this
line of thinking ignores what Manovich describes as the variable, iterative, and
transcodable nature of digital media (2001 27). The process of transcoding is
illustrated by the adaptation of the shooting/killing mechanic from ‘violent’
videogames into other functions. Such games use the affect produced by game
mechanics commonly associated with ‘violence’ – firing a weapon at an enemy in
order to remove it from play – to provoke different significations relative to
the affective relationship. For example, the Christian game
Catechumen (2000)
utilizes game mechanics consistent
with the ‘first-person shooter’ genre, but alters the representational result
of firing a gun from ‘killing an enemy’ to ‘saving a soul’. Similar
substitutions manifest in
Team Fortress 2 (2007) which, in certain
instances, replaces all representations of violence with ‘cute’ versions (instead
of blood and gore, exploding bodies are full of candy and ballons, for
example), as well as
Portal (2007), in which the player’s ‘gun’
transubstantiates (re-embodies) the player him- or herself into the role of the
bullet in order not to ‘witness’ killing, as it were, but rather to solve
problems involving spatial geometry and Newtonian physics, and the ‘dubstep
gun’ in
Saints Row IV (2013)
,which causes enemies to dance
uncontrollably in time with music positioned as simultaneously diegetic and
non-diegetic. In each instance, the affect produced by player activity is
substantively the same despite antithetical representational differences
between games. Communication theories which model ‘messages’ sent and received
do not properly account for these differences.
Ian Bogost forwards a model in which video games can be rationalized in
terms of the forms of the procedural rhetoric which they present to players. In
Unit Operations (2006) and Persuasive Games (2007), Bogost presents
a model for understanding videogames which merges the material and the
symbolic. Grounding his thought in the mathematical philosophy of Alain Badiou,
Bogost figures ‘the message’ of digital media to consist of a fundamental
multiplicity centred upon processes of quantification and calculation. Unlike
traditional communication models, this conception seeks to understand digital
interactive media not in terms of broad systemic relationships but rather by
means of the small procedural interventions which, viewed as an aggregate and
in relation to each other, come to govern larger systems. Rather than being a
relatively stable object whose meaning is causally informed by the recipient’s
relation to the sender, digital media such as videogames operationalize this
relationship in a dynamic manner. Audiences may respond in a capacity fully
expected and thus invoked by the designer – ostensibly signalling the
successful uptake of a message. However, as Michael Nitsche (2008) and Jesper
Juul (2005) have elaborated, players may engage in actions not at all
anticipated by game designers. Indeed, the very nature of digital media as
interactive and iterative renders them as “systems open for transgressive,
emergent gameplay” (Nitsche 28).The multiplicity of possible responses to a
given digital ‘text’ suggests to Bogost that absolute meanings cannot be encoded
into digital communication processes in the manner suggested by earlier
communication models. Instead of invoking encoded meanings, “procedural
rhetoric is particularly devoted to representing, communicating, or persuading
the player toward a particular biased point of view” (Bogost, Persuasive Games 135) within the
framework of a spectrum of possible player responses, the meaning of each
response being conditioned by the relation of that response to the overall
pattern of responses enabled by a particular operation.
Thus, it might seem natural to view the programming code produced by
videogame designers as a quite literal manifestation of Hall’s communications model:
a sender encoding a message which is received in a multitude of ways by an
audience negotiating a hierarchy of dominant meanings. However, this
interpretation does not allow for the reciprocal creation of videogame
‘messages’ among game producers and players. Many games, either formally or
not, allow players to modify and create game elements which can, in turn, be
objects for consumption by other players or cooption by the game’s ‘official’
designers. This activity can effect changes at both the ‘textual’ level (an
object produced in a game may alter symbolic relations structured in/by the
game) and the meta-textual level in
which the player operates (an object produced in a game can be sold for
material value, i.e., money, in the ‘real’ world). Also, there are numerous
instances where audience ‘misreadings’ – player activity which transgresses the
manifest intention of game rules or willfully creates new gameplay activities
unintended by game designers – have been subsequently incorporated as
‘official’ elements of the game. Espen Aarseth (2003), for example, outlines
the manner in which the “rocket jump” – using the negative damage feedback
produced by an exploding weapon to positively assist player mobility and enable
access to areas within the game otherwise unavailable to players – was adopted
by game designers as an ‘official’ characteristic of the ‘first-person shooter’
game genre after emerging from unanticipated player activity. Mia Consalvo
(2007) examines the manner in which instances of purposefully-transgressive player
activity indicate patterns of agency within a virtual space of value generation
which she describes as “gaming capital” (4). In this capacity, cheating serves
to reorient the relationships between games, game designers, and players. An
incident often cited (Aarseth 2007) in this respect occurred when a programming
bug in the multiplayer online game Ultima
Online resulted in a player being able to murder the ruler of the game’s
fictional world, a character who was controlled by the game’s principle
designer and who served as an interface mechanic by which players were
motivated toward specific goals and forms of gameplay; rather than punish the
player for transgressing the established rules, the game designer chose to
integrate this event into the game itself. Furthermore, some games are
structurally enabled by player participation, or even the polyvalent
interactions among numerous players in relation to each other, and do not
present signification, as such, as distinct from this activity. As Castronova
(2005) notes in relation to the economic effects of virtual economies, procedural
rules highlighting the player generation of activity are especially prevalent
in online games which involve thousands of players simultaneously. Not only do
such games allow for player-generated sources of value generation, but the
economies which have emerged in parallel with such games can be seen to
structure and inform both gameplay and games themselves. Finally, game
designers modify their output relative to feedback in terms not only of commercial
market forces and players expressing their opinions, but also through the
quantification of game play through the capturing of player activity from
within the game itself, data which Normoyle et al (2012) refer to as player
metrics. Indeed, despite the liberatory potential inherent to interactivity,
videogames – and digital media, more broadly – enable a level of user
surveillance only dreamed of by the hegemonic interests, such as television
advertisers, foundational to the production of ‘old media’. This capacity for
surveillance, coterminous with the processes of digital mediation, betrays the
altered subjectivities which ‘new media’ present in challenge to theories of
communication which predate their emergence.
A degree of accord can be seen to exist between the medium of videogames,
and ‘new media’ more generally, and conceptions of post- or transhumanism. Arguing
in How We Became Posthuman (1999)
that “the erasure of embodiment is a feature common to both the liberal humanist subject and the cybernetic posthuman”
(4), Katherine Hayles postulates that computer simulation best instantiates the
“embodied virtuality” which she presents in contradiction to the
de-materialization of information fundamental to transmission theories of
communication. Grounding her thought in Friedrich Kittler’s notion that
“technologies of inscription are media when they are perceived as mediating”
(26) and Donna Haraway’s conception of informatics as “technologies of
information as well as the biological, social, linguistic, and cultural changes
that initiate, accompany, and complicate their development” (29), Hayles adheres
to the technological determinism of transmission theories while rejecting their
linear and rigid structure. She presents a McLuhanesque argument in which the
dematerialization of information – indeed, of all matter into information – is a partial illusion invoked by “an
epistemological shift toward pattern/randomness and away from presence/absence”.
The illusory nature of such processes of dematerialization obscures the
impossibility of material reconstruction from disembodied information and
minimizes the dynamic relationship between agents within a communication
process. In other words, theories of communication which dematerialize
information deploy incomplete models of the totality of relations between
entities positioned within and acting upon an event of communication. This
notion of pattern and randomness, echoing theories from quantum physics concerning
the fields of probability which determine the material existence of the world,
“fundamentally alter[s] the relation of signified to signifier” (30). Unlike
the ‘message’ of the transmission model, informatics construct the signifier as
a multitude, a “chain of markers bound together by the arbitrary relations specified
by the relevant codes” in which “[a] signifier on one level becomes a signified
on the next-higher level” (31). Access to the codes of signification, which
Hayles describes as “pattern recognition” (39) whose literacy is enabled by “credentialing
practices” (40; see also Stiegler 130), conditions and is conditioned by the technologies
constituting the media environment. The development and interplay of these
technologies mutually structures all entities within what Kittler’s
(extrapolating from McLuhan) terminology could be described as a “media
ecology”, including those individuals or agents which participate in the
creation and consumption of media.
Hayles’s conception resonates with other invocations of posthuman
subjectivity. By positioning the human subject in a determinate relation to the
technological means by which phenomena exterior to unassisted perception are
brought forth (in a Heideggerian manner) into human understanding, Don Ihde (2002)
expands the realm of visuality to include all phenomenological events mediated
by technological processes (43). In a manner similar to the interactive user
participation foundational to ‘new media’ such as software and videogames,
Ihde’s model for mediation inserts the observer into the syntax of the observed
(60). Invoking Bruno Latour’s examination of instrumental subjectivity as
stated in “On Technical Mediation” (1994), Ihde thus involves the interplay
between technological determination and human agency in terms of a third space
generated by the cohabitation of the two agencies (2002 93-95). This third
space can be further described by Haraway’s conception of cyborgs as “a hybrid
of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of
fiction” (1991 149). Like Ihde and Latour, Haraway seeks to avoid understanding
identities in essentialist terms. Identity can be understood, in a sense, as
itself a cyborg hybridising agency and determination by exterior forces
(161ff). ‘New media’ centred upon computational procedures also invoke an
examination of the posthuman subject inaugurated by McLuhan’s (1994) conception
of the media functioning as extensions of the human nervous system. Stiegler
(2009) argues that such processes of exteriorization “constitute the
industrialization of memory at all of its levels” (99). This externalized memory
functions in thrall to developments related to speed. By eliminating delays and
inefficiencies, the boundaries which interface processes of technological
mediation from that which is mediated are dissolved as information becomes
“inseparable from its organization” (107). Valuation of information in this
context is informed by systems of access, which in turn constitute as subject
those individuals or agents which create a ‘circuit of access’ with the
information in question.
Paul Virilio’s (2000, 1997, 1989) notion of the contraction of the modern
subject into patterns of communication quantised and defined by a society which
increasingly internalises and normalises military functions traces the manner
in which quantification serves as the vehicle for the realization and
production of truth. While Virilio’s reliance on phenomenology disavows for him
the authenticity of virtual worlds, other scholars (Hansen 2006, Fors &
Jakobsson 2002, Murray & Sixsmith 1999) have successfully adapted
phenomenological methodology to the study of virtual worlds and ‘new media’. Numbers
are the principle tools by which subjects come to understand and love their own
bodies and those of others. Bodies are measured and rationalised in order to
improve weaknesses and maximise strengths, and to define subjects within a
social and political hierarchy. For Virilio, quantification is a means of
visibility which reveals the truth of an object or event to be nothing more
than the tautological result of a logistical apparatus (the processes and
technologies of rational humanism) which instrumentalises such information into
functions allowing possession and control. Predictions about the future can
then be made based on a linear extension from these numerically-constituted
entities, a process which Virilio equates to a gun sight targeting the
destruction of an enemy in the future (1989; see also Crogan 2008, 158-9). In
this capacity, processes of quantification and calculation can be understood to
extend a haptic character to vision and visibility. Calculation grants
visibility to the invisible as unknown
data – future events, probable outcomes, ‘hidden’ truths – is extrapolated from
what is known for the purposes of
administration and control. This conception of visibility originating as a
military technology enabled by calculation has direct parallel with digital
gaming, which often fetishises and quantifies representations of violence and often
deploys military conquest as a gameplay mechanic. For Virilio, synthetic optics
enabled by computerization and calculation permit “the relative
fusion/confusion of the factual (or operational, if you prefer) and the virtual”
signaled by “the ascendancy of the ‘reality effect’ over a reality principle
already largely contested elsewhere” (1994 60).
As a conclusion to this present brief examination, the example of
computer role-playing games (CRPGs) will serve to tersely illustrate the manifest
synergy between human and interface for the creation and reception of media which
have come to define the ‘posthuman’ as described above. CRGPs require the
player to process and manage a significant amount of information, as the
representation of nearly everything in the game – objects, the abilities and descriptive
statistics of non-player characters and enemies, behavioural patterns – is
quantified not only to allow the computer to execute game rules, but for that
numerical representation to be presented to players who interpret this
information to “numerically optimise” their avatar’s progression through
whatever goals the game presents to the player. Extending Jenkins and Fuller’s
(1995) suggestion that game avatars function akin to cursors in conventional
computer interfaces, merging the will of the participatory user with the
disembodiment of materiality into its virtual form as information, numerical
representation can be understood as not only embodying the virtualized agents
which it replaces but as mirroring the development of subjectivity within technological
society. The conception of an embodied camera/interface, described as an
apparatus by Morris (2002) and defined largely in terms of its virtuality
rather than by the hardware components which allow player interaction (Jørgensen 2012), is best
exemplified by games which use a first-person perspective and thus combine
control of the representational output presented by the system with the means
of interaction in a manner embodying an otherwise absent avatar. In this
regard, the game interface of CRPGs is itself a self-referential component of
play, acting somewhat like Manovich’s embodied virtual cameras in digital
games, in which “cinematic perception functions as the subject [of games] in
its own right” (2001, 85) by placing viewing and perspective functions under
the player’s control. Avatars in CRPGs embody the player in a dual manner:
visually onscreen, and through a numerical matrix which operates in a manner
made explicit to the player and enframes in procedural terms the reified
instantiation of the will of the player into the fabric of the medium in both
material and immaterial terms. This conception of virtual embodiment, readily
applicable to the theories of ‘new media’ informed by the posthuman
subjectivities as outlined above, ably illustrates the manner in which the
technologies which enable ‘new media’ serve to challenge traditional
conceptions of communication processes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext:
Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1997.
--- “I Fought the Law:
transgressive play and the implied player”. DiGRA,
2007. Web. February
2014.
--- “Playing Research:
methodological approaches to game analysis”. Proceedings of the Digital
Arts and Culture Conference,
University of Bergen, 2003. Web. February 2014.
Babe, Robert E. Canadian
Communication Thought. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Barr, Pippin, and James Noble and Robert Biddle. “Video Game
Values: Human-computer Interaction
and Games”. Interacting With Computers 19.2 (2007): 180-195.
Bogost, Ian. Persuasive
Games. Cambridge: MIT, 2007.
--- Unit Operations. Cambridge: MIT, 2006.
Castronova, Edward. Synthetic
Worlds: the business and culture of online games. Chicago: University
of Chicage Press, 2005.
Consalvo, Mia. Cheating:
gaining advantage in videogames. Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, 2007.
Crogan, Patrick. “Wargaming and Computer Games: Fun with the
Future,” in The Pleasures of Computer
Gaming, ed. Melanie Swalwell and
Jason Wilson, 147-166. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.
Dienst, Richard. Still
Life In Real Time. Durham, USA: Duke UP, 1994.
Fors, Anna Croon, and Mikael Jakobsson. “Beyond use and
design: the dialectics of being in virtual
worlds”. Digital Creativity 13.1 (2002): 39-52.
Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming:
Essays on Digital Culture. (Minneapolis: The University of Minneapolis
Press, 2006).
Gazzard, Alison, and Alan Peacock. “Repetition and Ritual
Logic in Video Games”. Games and Culture 6.6 (2011): 499-512.
Hall, Stuart.
“Encoding/Decoding.” Culture, Media and Language. Ed. Stuart Hall et al.
New York:
Routledge, 1980. 117-127.
Hansen, Mark. B.N. Bodies
in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Haraway, Donna. “A
Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century.” Simians,
Cyborgs and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-182.
Harviainen, J. Tuomas. ”Ritualistic Games, Boundary Control,
and Information Uncertainty”. Simulation
& Gaming 43.4 (2012):
506-527.
Harviainen, J. Tuomas, and Andreas Lieberoth. “Similarity of
Social Information Processes in Games and
Rituals: Magical Interfaces”. Simulation & Gaming 43.4 (2012):
528-549.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How
We Became Posthuman. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Ihde, Don. Bodies in
Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2002.
Jenkins, Henry, and Mary Fuller. “Nintendo and New World
Travel Writing: A Dialogue,” in Cybersociety.
Ed. Steve Jones. London: SAGE
Publications, 1995. 57-72.
Jørgensen, Kristine. “Between
the Game System and the Fictional World: A Study of Computer Game
Interfaces”. Games and Culture 7.2 (2012):142-163.
Juul, Jesper. Half-Real.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.
Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford,
USA: Stanford UP, 1999.
Latour, Bruno. “On Technical Mediation.” Common Knowledge 3 (1994): 29-64.
Manovich, Lev. The
Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding
Media: the Extensions of Man. Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press,1994.
Morris, Sue. “First-Person Shooters – A Game Apparatus,” in Screenplay:Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces.
Ed. Geoff King and Tanya Krywinska.
London: Wallflower Press, 2002). 81-97.
Murray, Craig D, and Judith Sixsmith. “The Corporeal Body in
Virtual Reality”. Ethos 27.3 (1999):
315-343.
Nitsche, Michael. Video
Game Spaces: image, play, and structure in 3D worlds. Cambridge, USA:
The MIT Press, 2008.
Normoyle, Aline, and John Drake, Maxim Likhachev, and Alla
Safonova. “Game-based Data Capture for
Player Metrics”. Association for the Advancement of
Artificial Intelligence 2012. Web. February 2014.
Stiegler, Bertrand.
“The Industrialization of Memory.” Technics
and Time, 2: Disorientation. Trans.
Stephen Barker. Stanford, USA:
Stanford UP, 2009.
Virilio, Paul. The
Information Bomb. New York: Verso, 2000.
--- Open Sky. New York: Verso, 1997.
--- The Vision Machine. London: BFI Publishing, 1994.
--- War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. New York: Verso, 1989.
Waggoner, Zach. My
Avatar, My Self: identity in video role-playing games. Jefferson, USA:
McFarland, 2009.
Weiner, Norbert. Cybernetics:
or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, 1948.
Wolfendale, Jessica. “My Avatar, my self: Virtual harm and
attachment”. Ethics and Information
Technology 9 (2007): 111-119.
[i]
See, for example, Cassie Rodenberg, “Grant Theft Auto V makes it cool to pick
up – even kill – prostitutes” published 27 December, 2013 in
The Guardian.
