In his response to Ed Folsom’s “Database as Genre,” Jerome McGann notes the importance of considering interface and user interaction as influential components of the process of text remediation, insisting that digital notation systems “function most effectively when they help to release the resources of the human mind–in short, when their interfaces are well-designed” (McGann 1591). Likewise, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin write about the use of photorealism in digital enterprises such as gaming production in order to help users achieve a sense of hypermediation, in which a gamer can disregard the medium in order to experience content. Consumer demand for hyperrealistic, fictional experiences drives significant competition among media providers: “Whenever one medium seems to have convinced viewers of its immediacy, other media try to appropriate that conviction” (Bolter and Grusin 9). Popular first-world culture is, in other words, in a race to design invisible interfaces, not facsimiles. The same human longing that insists on the inclusion of impressive physics engines in video games requires the creation of high-definition digital textual archives. What is that longing, though? I think it would be naïve to reduce the desire for digital realism to mere escapism. Current European and North American trends in tabletop gaming, particularly in the homes of younger, internet-savvy “analog” gamers, may imply a shift in expectations for digital hypermediation and interface design—a shift that recognizes the digital interface but demands a more personal experience with other human beings through distinctly human immediacy.
Erkki Huhtamo acknowledges that “‘Technology is gradually becoming a second nature, a territory both external and internalized, and an object of desire. There is no need to make it transparent any longer, simply because it is not felt to be in contradiction to the “authenticity” of the experience [of digitized media]’” (qtd. in Bolter and Grusin 42). A digital plane intersects our daily lives, to the point that entertainment aimed at younger demographics no longer needs to be art imitating life. The advent of tabletop games such as Netrunner make this readily apparent—it seems odd for a card game to feature a cyberpunk “hacker” whose goal is to raid a corporate entity in order to obtain “agendas,” thus disrupting dystopian corporate power. (The hacker can raid corporate “archives,” a discard pile, for tossed agendas, but that’s an observation for another post.) One would expect such a game to be played primarily on the computer, but Netrunner is a surprisingly low-tech game that encourages an intimate competition between two human, face-to-face players. It is unique in that the game’s victory conditions do not depend upon the representation of physical battle (which usually features in both video and tabletop games), but upon the requisition of abstract ideals. The digital world manifested by the illustrations on the game cards is merely a stage, a passive bystander in the competition between the players. Games like Netrunner are much discussed online, but the popularity of the physical card game indicates a cultural need for physical human intimacy that is lost in digital worlds. The game, for all its cyberpunk fantasy, is hyperrealistic in a way a video game can never be, because players experience the immediacy of another human being during competition—but they imagine themselves to be in a digital world.
Lisa Gitelman writes, “the World Wide Web is more consistently a text than a market [with] rhetorical force [and] significant economic implications” (145). I would revise this a bit to say that the World Wide Web is more consistently a sought experience than a market. We design hyperrealistic digital worlds not because we’re looking for communication or information or even an escape from our analog realities. We design hyperrealistic digital worlds because we are acknowledging and sharing a human experience via a medium, and we long for an intimate connection with the human presence that haunts every line of code. We may not think of this when we log onto Expedia to purchase plane tickets, or when we log onto Steam to play Warframe, but our shared digital experiences very much define what is real to us—and, if Netrunner is any indicator—what is real to us does include digital life, visible interfaces, bad graphics and all.
