Altered States

Christine White

A beautifully designed videogame invokes wonder as the fine arts do, only in a uniquely kinetic way. Because the videogame must move, it cannot offer the lapidary balance of composition that we value in painting; on the other hand, because it can move, it is a way to experience architecture, and more than that to create it, in a way which photographs or drawings can never compete. If architecture is frozen music, then a videogame is liquid architecture.

Steve Poole with these words attempts to raise in the viewer/user's consciousness the prowess of the art forms that develop/create and enable the process of developing videogames. He invokes the sacred geometry that lies behind the presentation of the visual, as architectures of maths and music but it is commercial and global concerns that have given videogames prowess and their artistic merit is seldom celebrated. Success rated by popularity and usually accruing commercial value too, has often achieved little critical repute.

In The Location of Culture Homi K. Bhabha proposes that globalization must begin at home as this enables us to recognize the 'predatory effects of global governance'; he argues for the rights of cosmopolitanism to be recognized, rights of diversity and the richness of the history of human civilization. In all this, the individual's claim for identity is a difficult path between the global and local, where ancestry and travel have changed our experiences, heritage and parentage beyond that of any other generation. In the last two decades more people have lived between or across national borders than ever before with one estimation from UNESCO as high as 40 million migrant workers, 20 million refugees and 20–25 million people displaced due to famine and civil war. The borders of culture are breaking down, and much of this breakdown is being determined by technologies of communication, be they computer, via e-mail or VOIP technologies, design images, which are part of a global culture transmitted via cable, wireless, terrestrial or extra-terrestrial technologies; the Internet and the interactive, downloads, pod casts, webpages and blogs, which contemplate and document human action and interaction in a way that could not have been thought possible 50 years ago.

A democratization is occurring which by offering the ability to speak in a global context, makes it far harder for oppressive regimes to maintain control, when the population of a country can get a perspective of their local world from a global context, from news media and local webblog comment.

The communications of people to people across the world have enabled many changes from local cultures and economies to global cultures and economies and these cross-border forays of cultural practice have altered ways of reading and perceiving. Professor Sue Thomas worked on a project called 'Transliteracy – Reading in the Digital Age'. In 2005, she ran a conference looking at the use of the Internet and its possible causes for anxiety or opportunity. The research was particularly concerned with reading in the digital age. The claim and concern for scholars was that the web is primarily a textual medium, which, therefore, requires reading – often of more than two languages, one being predominately English. This emphasis on reading gives an enormous boost to text, however, it caused some concern and anxiety by the fluidity of reading possible on shifting platforms. The platforms could be blogs, e-mail, hypertext and mobile media. The concerns were that text was being superseded by image, audio or even ideogram as the communication language of choice, and of course, in the context of the conference's research, that would change the nature of literacy.

The development of the global technology of communication has enabled an anarchic liberalism, where the evolving knowledge presented is not academically peer-reviewed but, as in the case of Wikipedia, is globally viewed, reviewed, and multi-edited by collaborators who are collaborating in providing edited definitions of knowledge. However, Wikipedia when launched in 2001, was originally inspired by the door-to-door selling of encyclopedia in the 1970s and a wish to use the computer to liberalize knowledge. Initially, the inventor asked academics to write definitions for the online-free-content-encyclopedia, but he decided that the entries were too dry and dull and so he opened the editorial role to everyone. Wikipedia encourages not only debate but in recent years has also been open to abuse, particularly with regard to, the number of times the entry on George Bush has had to be re-written or cleaned up.

The ways of reading the web are predominately visual, and it is rare for a viewer to simply read the pages one after another in a linear fashion; what is more usual is to edit as part of reading. We read a part, line or paragraph, skip irrelevant content and move through the information to find what we want. Often this is navigation done through visual structures, and by and through a sense of associative ideas. If this is the case, are we losing narrative structure and are the readers enabled by this seeming lack of coherence? This lack of coherence may in fact be what is attractive. This random kind of thinking/viewing is a very liberal response to creativity without a defining knowledge of narrative coherence. What impact does this liberalism and use of associative connections have on the brain if it is now so prominent a style of communication? Is there a problem with the lack of coherence? In his famous book, Homo Ludens: a study of play-element in culture, Huizinga writes, 'any thinking person can see at a glance...