Read the texts indicated in the workbin and consider the following questions for the discussion in the tutorial:

Shira Chess discusses how a game like GTA actually disciplines the player into the ideologies and structures of contemporary society. GTA induces (or plays into) certain desires in the player - this is how it generates pleasure in the player.
1. How does the game lock the player into a certain 'subject position'?

P, 81 – Enclosure of disciplinary monotony; Cellular – forced narrative that keeps player within certain spaces in the game and in reality (p. 82); Genetic – time limits in the game lock the player into virtual rather than real time (p. 83); Organic – Precise movements and locked game narrative structure codifies and makes movements repetitive (p. 84); Combinatory – Rewards such as rank and points etc. are handed out based on obedience to these rules (p. 85).

2. What role does the interactive element play in this?
Supports the Western legal system by creating an inner penal system within the game that promotes conformity and legal behavior in the real world (panopticon); does this by using a reward system where crime doesn’t pay since the player is doomed to be killed or jailed (p. 89).

3. How does Chess' assessment of GTA relate to Manovich' discussion on interactivity?

Who is in control in User-to-System Interactivity? Manovich suggests that technology (i.e., the Internet) has objectified/codified the scope of interactivity. Contrast this with art without implementation – Yoko Ono’s “Record the Sound of Falling Snow.”

4. How does this subjugation of the player relate to stereotypical gendered and raced representations of 'others' in the game?

Player is subjugated under a binary of real vs. imaginary; exaggerated references to racial and gendered stereotypes implicitly acknowledge the political incorrectness of such sentiments; stereotype is so cartoony that as much as it re-enforces the stereotype, brings attention to what is politically correct (p. 87).

Use Wendy Chun's piece to explain why interactive technologies, like the Internet, invoke a disorientation and a 'fear of the other'.

1. What is particular about the aesthetic of interactive media?
It belongs to the frontier of the mind (disembodiment) with everything reduced to images, which therefore avails itself for the user to orientalize the experience (p. 7); At the same time, there is the danger of going native (p. 29); think of how the self and other reference and codify each other:

Assume that in this world, only John and Dave exist.

John is strong, and Dave (the native) is weak.

John’s superiority in terms of strength only has meaning if it is contrasted with Dave’s weakness.

So, John always has to reference Dave in order to appear superior.

In this case, John has been nativized because (i) not only does the self-concept of John now always include Dave, John can only ever be defined against categories that have meaning to Dave, in this case strength. So for example, if John and Dave has the same intelligence, John cannot define himself in a superior way using this characteristic.

2. In turn then, how do the current dominant fantasies or metaphors of interactive technologies, as well as the cybernetic interface itself, manage Western fears of the economically emerging orient (like China or Japan)?
p. 13 – metaphor of interactive technology is of the American cowboy who is able to avoid assimilation by the Japanese zaibatsu, and preserves an individualistic realm where the American can still triumph; p.13-14 – Jacking into cyberspace disembodies the self, making one anonymous and thus powerful; when the self no longer has to create a facade of the presented self, it is free to live by its own ideals; p. 12 – images of the Other are confined to the first point of meeting where colonialism triumphed, and where the Self is in a position to freeze an image of the Other within an Orientalized past; low tech future of the other (p. 23) allows for the fantasy of reconquering the Other (p. 26)

3. Why is a film like Ghost in the Shell so popular with Western audiences, and how

does this relate to racialised depictions of space, and characters in the anime?
p. 26 – Anime allows American viewers to orientalize and thereby penetrate into Japanese culture. P. 28 – The film is ambiguous enough to alienate the viewer, thereby allowing enough narrative space for interpretation (i.e., to orientalize). P. 9 – In addition, the nature of cyberspace/television is such that the Other is observed at a distance, which means that the self is free to interpret the Other without a chance of any errors being pointed out; p. 27 – The viewer’s gaze often coincides with that of the Major, which turns the viewer into a voyeur with a subjective locus with which to interpret the images being presented; this affords the viewer a chance to delve into fantastical interpretations (i.e., to orientalize)

4. Discuss the possible relationship between Chun's argument of 'cyberspace' as facilitating orientalist fantasies, with the common stereotyping by Western players of the 'Chinese' as 'goldminers' spoiling the pleasure of the game in, for instance, WoW.

Image of the yellow peril is enhanced rather than challenged.