Re-mediation and Games

When one medium is represented in another, it's called re-mediation. Re-mediation is said to be a defining characteristics of the new digital media.

When gaming first came about it was thought to overtake the film industry, but that never happened. However, the gaming industry has seen a huge surge of success in the last decade, so much so that they are reviewed in the same way as films. The medium is on par with films and therefore it's becoming a huge part of our modern lives. Because of this, it's to be expected that the different mediums would cross over into one-another.

It's not just films and games that are a part of mediation, photography and paintings are also a good example of remediation. 'Photorealistic' art is a cross between photography and art in which paintings or drawings are created in such a way that they appear to be flawlessly realistic, see an example below.

IMMEDIACY

• Media that aspire to a condition of transparency.
• The aim is to make the viewer ‘forget’ that they are watching a movie, for example, and be drawn in to the experience.
• Immersive virtual reality
• Photo realistic images

HYPERMEDIACY

• Artefacts that are aware of and wish to display their own constructed nature.
• They call attention to their own constructed nature all the time.
• Video Games HUDs

People may complain about or compliment games for 'copying' film techniques and trends, such as certain camera angles or narrative elements. The thing that people don't realise is that mediums take time to develop their own unique attributes. When film first came around, it was generally all filmed versions of theatrical shows; because of this films industry was thought to be a flop at the time. Just as with films, it will take a while for games to develop their own creation techniques.

Crawford's 6 Lessons on Storytelling

Lesson 1 - Stories are complex structures that must meet many hard-to-specify requirements
Most games don't look at the requirements needed to create a story. Because they dismiss a lot of these structural requirements, they concern themselves with things instead. Games will focus on things you obtain throughout the game, things to destroy, things to use to help you accomplish victory. Stories can't be called stories if they are about an object, they should be able people.


Lesson 2 - Stories are about the most fascinating things in the universe: people
People play the key role in stories, because people can use conflict to drive a story. Somebody who reads a story will expect progression through human emotions, they also need to be able to empathise with them to an extent. Objects and tools can be important to a story, they will help the character progress further, but it's the way that the characters are feeling and thinking that interests the audience.


Lesson 3 - Puzzles are not a necessary component of stories
Characters make decisions in stories, and these decisions affect the progression and outcome of said stories. Games have taken the idea of decision-making and added spectacle to it. Providing exotic imagery as a form of entertainment is a spectacle, something the audience hasn't seen before. They can take a decision-based story and instantly make it more exciting by adding better graphics and effects; however, Aristotle said that spectacle is the least important of the six elements of a story.


Lesson 4 - Spectacle does not make stories
Games are always trying to improve their appearance, or spectacle, but traditionally visuals are created by using our own amazing tools that are hard-wired into our brains: our imagination. Books are an excellent example of this, as although there is nothing but pages of text, it leaves us to imagine our own surroundings and characters to place the story into. In games you wouldn't be able to tell how a character is thinking by just looking at them, visual spectacle is limited.


Lesson 5 - Visual thinking should not dominate storytelling
Spatial reasoning is when we can work something out by using our knowledge of space. When used metaphorically it works well, and allows us to use statements such as "Your statement is wide of the mark". However, Crawford states that "when people use it too literally in storytelling, it becomes a problem.


Lesson 6 - Stories take place on stages, not maps
Stories will mess around with time, they will break it up, jumping backwards and forwards, as well as skipping parts altogether. They will skip how the character arrives at a place, or what they even did during their journey there. I personally think that this is a good thing, because it would get incredibly boring having to listen every detail given; stories are split up into particular sections for a reason: to keep the audience interested. Modern games use this quite well, cutting out parts you don't need, but most games involve you taking your character to every destination you need to go to. A good example of this would be JRPGs, as they force you to walk to every new area without skipping parts.

Gender and Games

It is fairly obvious for any average onlooker that the games industry is extremely segregated when it comes to gender dominance. Traditionally the games industry was seen as extremely 'nerdy' and therefore unappealing to a mainstream audience, let alone a female audience. Recently though, in the last decade, the market has been slowly opening up as more modern views on  gaming are created; there are now games for every person, males, females, children and adults. Although the market for games has expanded, can the same be said for the industry?


By looking at the United Kingdom National Gamers Survey 2009 we can get some factual representation of the industry. The Gamers Survey provides authoritative data on gamers across all main game platforms and covers key European markets and the US.

As you can see in the first chart above, the ratio between males and females playing games are actually fairly similar, there is a slight increase in males playing over females, but generally speaking they're on even footing. The same can't be said for average hours, as it's apparent that males generally spend a lot more time playing games than females. For the 13 - 19 years, males spend more than 3x the time playing video games than females.


All of the charts reflect the same basic idea, although there are a lot of female gamers, they don't tend to play games very often.

A report by the online games magazine, MCV (2008) suggests that the percentage of women within the games industry in core creation or developmental roles is around just 6.9%. More recent figures produced by Skillset (2009) found that women represent 4% of the game industry’s workforce, a decrease from 12% in 2006 (Skillset, 2006). Even the small percentage of female employees consist of jobs such as marketing and writing, and rarely occupy jobs which affect the game in big ways such as art or coding.


It's quite shocking to see this huge segregation in a medium which is thought to be getting a broader audience over time, so why is this happening? I believe that it's just a mindset that's been put in place over many years and that it won't change so suddenly. There may be more games targeted at girls, but it doesn't mean girls will find the idea of creating these games more appealing. Despite the figures, I still think over time the gender segregation will decrease, but for now it will have to remain a male-dominated industry.