Taylor argues that in giving the player this choice, “the boundaries of the computer game are opened up, and the user is encouraged to break beyond the confines of the gaming world with its circular logic and reinforcement of the system, to enter into real-life activism” (2011: 314).
Media creates (recreates?) representative spaces for people to interact outside of reality in a controlled way.
In this case, the environments of the games act as a moral landscape.
This is an interesting point! Do other forms of media in any way act as a moral landscape?
According to Shaw, the very places of these games help reinforce this otherness: “the military entertainment complex depicts Middle Eastern cities as in a state perpetual war. More than just maze-like and mystical, the Middle Eastern city is a site of conĚict that must be brought under Western democratic order” (ibid.: 796).
This is bigger than video games, it shows how media can reinforce stereotypes. Examples: newspapers, movies, TV shows, advertisements, social media apps, because they create spaces where many people will never have the opportunity to see with their own eyes/ will not educate themselves further than to hear the story that is in front of them.
If space in video games is understood as meeting point of body and screen, then place can be understood as the content of the image on-screen that organizes and shapes the tasks and activities of the user as the play.
I think it could be argued that this is true of social media such as Snap Chat.
Developing a post-phenomenological account of body, brain, screen, and interface, I argue that the space of the image and the capacity of the user to control this image generate a sense of locatedness in time and space through the activities and possibilities for movement that the user negotiates as they play. From this perspective there is no “imaginative” space in the mind’s eye created from available images.
Is this true of other forms of web/screen based media or only video games?
Simply put, a dichotomy between virtual and real is unhelpful. Players need their bodies to experience and control the spaces and places of video games, and these spaces and places are already tied into particular geographical and material infrastructures, systems, and contexts.
Bodies in conjunction with video games create the space and place. Without the bodies of humans engaging and participating in the video game, there would be no creation of space and place within the vide game.
As Hillis goes on to argue, there is a long history in the Western world of thinking and conceptualizing space as primarily a visual phenomenon in which space extends outwards and beyond us: “visual space is the farthest removed from our bodily sense and covers the largest area experienced by a sense”
This is an interesting perspective on the sense of "sight/vision" and how it influences space/place.
In “the medium of the videogame,” Wolf (1997) identifies 11 basic geometries in games, including
How video game designers design their video games affects the types of spaces created within their games, thus affecting how gamers interact in these realms. Different games create different place and spaces through these 11 basic geometries.
possibility space
Video games are a form of media that creates an alternate space (possibility space) for people to interact in outside of reality.
He notes that when he lent cameras to some of the local residents, they “don’t photograph the slums. They photograph their friends ... all sort of possibilities, without sentimentality. They photograph the life they know, not its horrors.”
How does this relate to space and place? The fact that the local residents don't focus on the place but instead the people?
a photograph is also the product of imagination as it shapes perceptions of place (Schwartz 2000)
How is a photograph the product of imagination? Is it the snapshot of the big picture, and the choice of what to photograph?
here are the guidebooks and Web sites that promise one version of Athens, and then there is the modern Greek capital, Ěooded with travelers of all varieties, who invariably change the experience of visiting the place.
How do the tourists invariably change the experience of visiting the place?
ut differently, geographical imaginations are triggered by personal experience, but also by the visual and aural representations that we find in a variety of media, including photography.
I would argue that media gives people with no prior experience of that space/ place an initial idea of it and that that's how stereotypes are created by media. As discussed above, media is powerful and has the ability to highlight specific aspects of a place/ space, it only represents a sliver of the big picture.
PHOTOGRAPHY 23Making the ȃnowhereȄ of covert operations into a somewhere through the troubled yet continued relevance of photography’s thereness is what gives Paglen’s work its geographic immediacy and political relevance
Is he doing this by giving the destination a tangible location? Isn't everywhere somewhere?
he became a severe critic of that system, using her photographs to expose its structural inequalities. This becomes evident only when the photograph’s full caption, as lange intended it, is matched to the image itself:
If there is no caption is there still media? Without that caption is it not media?
It would, furthermore, acknowledge that Lange created this image with a specific agenda in mind, that it served her and other’s interests in competing ways.
What about photos that were simply created to exist with no geographical intention? Do all photos automatically have a geographical aspect or does the photographer have to actively incorporate geography in some way?
They engage us optically, neurologically, intellectually, viscerally, physicallyȄ (Heiferman 2012: 16)
I understand optically, neurologically, intellectually, and viscerally, but how do they engage us physically?
Marita sturken and lisa Cartwright (2001: 17) call this the myth of photograph truth and note that “although we know that images can be ambiguous and are easily manipulated or altered ... much of the power of photography still lies in the shared belief that photographs are objective or truthful records.
Where did this presumption come from? With social media, celebrities and magazines constantly editing and construing reality, my first instinct as a millennial is that the photo has been edited in some way. Another example is that when I see National Geographic photos they are often so dramatic, I assume they are edited in some way past reality.
But also clear is that, for everyone that aĞernoon at the small corner in akland, we were somehow having contact with a place and a time that affected us in profound and surprising ways. We were responding to the thereness of photography.
Media is education and is a form of travel and/or encourages people to travel/ further educate themselves on what is being portrayed.
et advertisements not only use place representations to promote consumption, which alters places, they also shade into architecture and thereby become places. The orange roof of the Howard Johnson’s, Mcdonald’s golden arches, or the obese homunculus in front of a Big Boy restaurant, all serve as media built into place for the purpose of increasing consumption.
Wow! I've never thought about media, space and place this way, but now every time I drive past similar franchises/ infrastructures, I'm struck at how these types of media and what they represent/ symbolize travel through different regions/ countries but remain the same.
This discussion addresses a powerful current of media-critiue: the allegations that spending time with media degrades the body to a tuberous state while media images themselves push us to strive for impossibly slender and muscular physiues. The chapter leaves room for progressive potentials in mediated forms of embodiment, acknowledging but also uestioning such critiues.
Is it not possible to interact with media so that it does not "degrade the body to a tuberous state". Why is it assumed that this is what it does?
we learn about inscribing oneself onto place through graĜti and about the ways in which products are inscribed onto places and subseuently onto the mind by advertising
This reminds me of the billboard example of media discussed in class, you are forced to interact with it because you can't turn your car around of a freeway.
. simply by internali£ing the narratives of National Geographic television specials and programs on the discovery Channel, we explore what it would be like to inhabit space and place as an animal (lulka, this volume), and this internali£ed awareness may in turn motivate animal rights activism, environmentalism, and other systematic alterations of action.
This example of media helps me understand how different forms of media connect people to places they would never otherwise see.
n the one hand, bodies make up much of the content of media:Bodies are ubiuitous in media. lim and ęt bodies, obese and arnialesue bodies, young and old bodies, murdered and mutilated bodies, alien and machinic bodies appear constantly on our television and computer screens, producing diverse modes of entertainment, engagement and contestation. (Cupples, this volume)n the other hand, bodies are reuired in order to engage the media.
This is what we discussed in class about observing the media as well as participating in it.
A medium is a network of particular dynamics constantly slipping through various hybrid configura
What does this mean?! How does this relate to media, space and place? What are the dynamics and how do they relate to the hybrid configurations?
These geographies are all about power in its various forms – for example, the global south has limited broadcasting access owing to topography, political oppression, and poverty. But when noting this we must avoid determinism: ȃlimiting a group’s access to media does not necessarily render it powerlessȄ (see Raento this volume).
Can we discuss these different geographies? I like the quote about limiting access to media doesn't make a country powerless but is that because it has other power or because media doesn't necessarily equal power?
The value of media geography resides to a maor extent in its propensity to test the boundaries of conventional worldviews.
The transition of a place or space using media, communicates facts or a story to people and cultures unable to experience that place/ space otherwise.
We would venture to suggest that here again the dividing line between opposing poles has blurred with time, in large part because an interest in the body and embodiment has brought attention not only to biological differences (e.g. sex and age) but also to aspects of embodied sameness in the human encounter with the world (e.g., eating, moving, seeing, hearing, touching).
I am confused as to what the "dividing line between opposing poles" is as well as what the poles specifically are. How has aspects of body and embodied sameness changed media in it's relation to space and place?
The turn of the b’ak’tun thus became a social, cultural, and economic event through media – to be precise, through transhistorical, international networks of cross-cultural communications, involving countless interpretations and reinterpretations.
Would it have become an event without these things?