The video game player has introduced a new participant to the
sport of spectator analysis. These new participants, nonetheless,
still share certain traits with their predecessor-- the traditional
media consumer. On a basic level, both pay money to engage with
a manufactured and marketed product. Within popular discourse,
however, the video game player is often portrayed as a radical
transformation of the traditional spectator. Recent films like
ExistenZ depict the video game player as a new species
of spectator that merges with the media, biologically blending
with the new technology in some digital-Darwinian evolution.
Although framed in sober prose, social critics and media analysts
tend to be equally sensationalist in their responses to video
games. Critics frame their discourse about video games from
the position that this new technology operates upon children.
Their critical and conceptual analysis metaphorically pins down
the spectator as a drone--being operated upon, affected, and
transform ed by the media. These views, in turn, download traditional
notions of the spectator as a passive receptor of media into
the video game player trapped by the even more powerful illusions
and connections created by the interactive dimension of the
new technology. Defining the spectator vis a vis a particular
media, such as the video game, we tend to accept the fact that
the media or genre single-handedly controls and constructs spectatorship.
In this light, video game players are often described as "zombies,"
"hypnotized," "zapped," or "enslaved"
by this new technology. In the context of conferences like this
one at MIT, however, we are hopefully moving away from such
sensationalist characterizations.
Still, a
more historically informed reconsideration of the video game
player needs to be explored. Part of this exploration will rely
on re-examining our traditional notion of the spectator in the
context of recent work on cognitive theory. In light of a historical
and theoretical understanding of the spectator, the video game
player seems less of an alien and more like one of us. Understanding
previous negotiations between spectators and media technology
historically can shed light on how humans interact with technology
in general. The digital revolution will look less like a radical
new game and more like a replay of the social and cultural games
people played in previous communications revolutions. This paper
examines the historical construction of the sports spectator
as it extends to the video game player. In particular, I am
interested in framing and broadening issues of spectatorship
as they have been more generally discussed and defined within
media studies and cognitive theory.
Cognitive
Theory and Spectating
In his work
on cognitive theory and narrative comprehension in film, Edward
Branigan divides the spectator's experience into "bottom-up"
and "top-down" perceptual activity. "Bottom-up"
processes deal with basic, immediate data like color, sound,
screen size, etc. These are areas that are processed fairly
instinctively and rapidly, requiring only short-term memory.
"Top-down" processes, on the other hand, refer to
information that gets processed based on acquired knowledge
and schemas. Branigan describes spectators working "top-down"
on the data, using their expectations and goals as principles
of organizing the information presented by a filmic narrative.
According to Branigan, "top-down processes are indirect
in the sense that they may reframe data in alternative ways
independently of the stimulus conditions which govern the initial
appearance of the data." (Branigan, 37) In other words,
the spectator brings innate capacities to their perception of
media. The spectator's top-down processes are fluid in relation
to the media, allowing the data to be reconstructed within certain
parameters offered by the narrative. Narrative comprehension
operates through various acts of analysis involving hypothetical
exploration, speculation, confirmation, and composition of possible
combinations of goals and actions.
Sports spectating
accentuates the cognitive activity of spectatorship in numerous
ways. Enjoying the narrative of a sporting event demands a capacity
for understanding and interpreting the formalized and standardized
rules of the game. Furthermore, the active sports fan is constantly
engaged in hypothetical speculation on various short-term and
long-term outcomes of the game, from pivotal plays to possible
strategies. The fires of such analytical observation are further
fanned by sports statistics, which are incorporated into the
spectating experience through technical devices--radio, scoreboards,
and television graphics--and the speculations of commentators.
In fact, televised games require both the interpretation of
the play-by-play announcers and additional information derived
from player interviews, expert analysis, commentary from former
players, and post-game specials engaged in analysis and hypothetical
speculation on alternative game scenarios.
Historical
Overview of the Sports Spectator
The contemporary
sports spectator and video game player derive from a longstanding
history and tradition of cognitive sports-watching. As urban
spectacles, baseball and football recast the frontier simplicity
of rural life in their fields with the pace, energy, and physical
demands of city living in the early part of our century. The
mastery demonstrated by the players represented skills valuable
in tackling the demands made upon urban citizens. Indeed, the
rise of organized sports in America is intimately tied with
the rise of cities and the urban culture. Organized sports were
not widespread in America before 1860. By the mid-1920s, there
were 200,000 football players and 10,000 coaches in high schools
alone. The spectacle of sporting events became an arena that
reflected the values of city living: dexterity, skill, mastery
of mechanics, rules, quickness; these were values common to
city living. Athletes demonstrated these skills on the playing
field, recasting the pace of urban (and industrial) life into
a form of entertainment. The most popular sport in the first
half of this century, baseball, although celebrated for its
supposed rural, frontier origins, was always a city sport. Urban
spectators got a charge from the fast play and the rational
design of professional baseball. Navigating the labyrinthine
streets and rapid pace of the modern city had awakened urban
spectators to value the skills embodied in professional sports
like baseball. They were astonished at the mastery of skills
involved in the swift execution of split-second plays.
The sports-city
connection was galvanized by the development of the telegraph
and print media. Telegraphers wrote game scores on blackboards
in local taverns, thereby instituting an urban network for sports-followers.
Early on, statistics of individual players became an integral
part of sports reporting. Sports journalists elaborated analytically
on the simple facts of the game and the box scores which were
now a regular part of a newspaper. Statistics and sports commentary
encouraged a cognitive frame of mind in the rising generation
of sports spectators. They learned the details of games in ways
that enabled them to become more engaged with the suspense of
the game. But the statistics also supplied them with new systematic
approaches to the game. An educated fan could become less fanatical
and more analytical. Sportswriters taught the spectator how
to interpret the game and how to transfer the stories on the
playing field into the field of common language and into the
fields of their lives. They framed the outcomes of game in larger
conceptual metaphors--like the efficacy of discipline and perfection--which
could be translated into meaningful lessons in the urban spectator's
life. Journalists praised athletes and coaches for their rapid
responses to situations in the game, for "thinking quick
on their feet." Each new game demanded an inventory of
past situations and projections based on how such information
might fuel future contests. Playing the field was similar to
playing the market or navigating a career.
Just as
one could develop a competence in sports, so one could develop
a competence in sports spectating. Learning how to watch a particular
sport involves learning the working methodology of a complex
symbol system, laden with values and possible combinations.
Understanding the multiple variations within a game and each
play, the symbolic meaning and value of lines, numbers, positions,
players, and rules is akin to understanding the relation of
discrete units of data and their relationship to larger schemas
of knowledge. Sports fans test their developing skills and educational
growth with each new game and each new play, measuring hypothetical
moves against the players or manager's choices. Each play or
each game is a pop-quiz with immediate feedback.
On the most
basic level, to follow a game a spectator must know the assigned
value to a ground-rule double in baseball, or to a three-point
line in basketball, or the number of yards per down in football.
Such actions on the field are designated values within a variable
system of factors. In fact, the rules in sports are value-laden
in a mathematical sense. They generate meaning and answers by
creating possibilities in combination with other value-laden
objects or events. Player and game statistics add new figures
to multiply the number of possible outcomes of given scenarios.
For example, how many times the batter hits into double-plays,
what the batter's average is with runners on base, against right-handed
pitchers, against left-handed pitchers, with runners on base
in late innings. This information must be weighed against the
many values that belong to a given situation. Television and
radio are technologies that heighten the speculative activities
common to watching games. Commentators supply statistics that
are pertinent to a fan's engagement with the game (computers
have played a role in expediting and expanding this process,
dispersing the data faster to the commentators and helping to
manage new statistical averages. In short, deciphering this
information involves interpreting and categorizing multiple
interacting variables. The sports fan is engaging such top-down,
cognitive processes as weighing the value of various data to
speculate on multiple outcomes of different scenarios. The sports
fan is fluidly moving backward and forward in the narrative
of the game, and reformulating values as the game unfolds. In
the cases from sports media above, the various apparatuses employed
by the media are working with the innate capacities of the sports
fan.
Speculating
on and combining the varying values in game situations is carried
to extremes in Rotisserie baseball or Fantasy Football, leagues
organized by groups of fans that recreate imaginary games based
on the values of players and plays. Using the statistics of
individual players in actual professional games, the fantasy
leagues assign values to players' performances in imaginary
"games" on teams arranged by the player-fans. The
fantasy league models itself on a limited range of the rules
of the particular sport. The fantasy owners model themselves
on the workings of the league owners: trading players, selling
players, and managing the teams. The leagues display the shifting
conceptual modes of identification of sports fans, from admiring
the skills of particular players to thinking and strategizing
like an owner or manager.
Watching
a sport took on an interactive dimension through imitating the
sports in amateur games. As early as the 1880s, instructional
manuals were published with titles like Batting and Pitching
with Fine Illustrations and Scientific Baseball. Department
stores and mail-order houses added sporting goods sections to
their sales rosters. The 1895 Sears, Roebuck's catalogue included
eighty pages of sports items, including baseball paraphernalia.
On empty city streets and vacant lots, in parks and in the growing
playgrounds, boys and men tried to imitate the professionals.
Furthermore, as sports spectators, participation in amateur
sports ideally sharpened their skills as followers and interpreters
of the games-a doubling of spectator and participant.
The interpretive/interactive
nature of sports spectatorship grew with television sports broadcasting,
and eventually produced radical changes in the relationship
of professional sports, media, and the spectator. ABC's Roone
Arledge is commonly celebrated for introducing a new analytical
attack in television's coverage of sporting events in the early
1960s. Arledge employed an arsenal of new media technological
developments to revive fan interest in, what was at that time,
the struggling sport of football: directional microphones, end
zone camera, 'canned' interviews, isolated shots, split-screen
effects, and graphics of athlete's statistics. Redesigning television
coverage with an emphasis on the medium's capacity as a tool
for analysis built on and expanded the tradition of the analytical
sports spectator. Television allowed the fan to conceptualize
the game into units of play, to dissect plays into shots, thereby
interacting and interpreting. In Arledge's early 1960s football
coverage, the hand-held shots of the sidelines that punctuated
the game coverage and the isolated close-ups of plays, which
analytically penetrated the game, reinforced the notion of an
interactive viewer, appealing to a tradition of sports watching
as an interpretive act.
The sports
announcers, whose critical commentary adds to the varying angles
of coverage, replays, and especially the printed information
over the images, further facilitate televisual analysis. Previews
and highlights of upcoming games fragment the narrative of the
games, reminding the viewer that the game functions in an overall
narrative that measures a season's schedule of games and the
competition for first place. Commentators analyze a player's
statistics (printed on the screen, or superimposed over the
player's image), measuring a player's performance in similar
scenarios in past games or against the particular opposing team
or particular opponent. Football coverage employs computer graphics,
which turn play diagrams into 3-D icons with Xs and Os sweeping
across a grid. Such televisual tactics highlight the speculative
and interpretive process of sports speculating, engaging the
viewer in the top-down process of reframing the game data in
possible variations. The commentators and graphics aid the spectator
in imagining how a previous play or new play might change or
could have changed the course of the game.
The replay,
especially the slow-motion replay, is the apotheosis of Roone
Arledge's methods. The instant replay could be used to detect
whether a player or ball was in or out of bounds, whether a
player fouled another player, whether a player made a tag or
not, reached base before the throw or not, or made a shot before
the buzzer. In short, the television viewer could scrutinize
the close plays that eluded the actual spectator and even the
players, coaches, and officials.
The most
interesting case of the instant replay occurs on those occasions
when television reveals a clear mistake or missed call on the
part of the sports official. At such moments, the television
spectator is put in a privileged position in relation to the
game. But it is an oddly negative epistemological advantage.
The television spectator's knowledge in this case has an empty
value in relation to the factors that determine the outcome
of the actual game. The game being watched now goes on as if
the official's call were correct, leaving television spectators
to imagine a different possible game in their heads. Thus, the
information or data supplied by the instant replay is essentially
meaningless. Reading (traditionally) vis a vis the media, we
might say that the sports instant replay illustrates the manipulative
quality of television in that it fools the spectator into a
position of illusory privilege. However, these specific instances
of the instant replay (where there is a split between game knowledge
and television knowledge) play into a tradition of sports spectator
interpretive-inter-activity, where/of imagining different/alternative
outcomes of specific plays and games. The instant replay plays
into such cognitive top-down processes of manipulating given
data into alternative scenarios, of playing with facts, and
moving forward and backward in conceptual replays of linear
events.
In addition
to expert commentary and the instant replay, television has
added graphs and animation to enhance speculation on upcoming
plays and analysis of previous plays. Football coach turned
commentator John Madden has established a televisual signature
(camera-stylo) with his famous electronic pen, scribbling diagrams
across the television screen like a chalkboard.
Isolated
close-ups of the particulars of a play, slow-motion, and celebratory
replays have become such an integral part of the sportswatching
experience that stadiums have added large video screens to their
scoreboards. This action recognizes the fetishized position
of analysis in television coverage of sports and the ways in
which it has enhanced the traditional analytical sport spectator.
However, television (home viewing) still retains one area of
privilege: stadium screens carefully avoid replaying any controversial
close calls by referees or umpires. Doing so would upset the
integrity of the live sports event. "Playing tips"
segments are a central part of sports broadcasting (an extension
of this broadcasting device is found in instructional videos
featuring superstar athletes). Playing tips…represent a
notion of "interactivity" in sports viewing and broadcasting,
wherein the spectator is positioned as somewhat more than passive,
as a possible participant at some level. Whether or not a large
or small percentage of spectators actually incorporate these
tips (which is more probable with a sport like golf, but highly
unlikely with baseball, which demands a greater number of participants
to function), these segments position the spectator in an interactive
role, at least momentarily. On another level, these segments
fuel the interpretive spectator with new insight into the players
and new information for the speculative/hypothetical thinking
that is involved in watching sports.
Video
Game Players
Understanding
the formalized rules of the game, problem-solving, pattern recognition,
hypothesis testing, estimating skills, resource management,
interpreting quantified and value-laden information (for example,
player's statistics), mapping, memory, quick thinking, and reasoned
judgments about anticipated scenarios: these are all traits
of a seasoned sports spectator. At the same time, all of these
skills prepare one for being a good video game player.
A skilled
sports spectator deals with multiple interacting variables,
assessing new information as the game quickly shifts in value:
a team shifts from offense to defense, substitutes a player,
the bases are loaded and one team switches pitchers, while the
opposing team sends up a pinch-hitter. A sports spectator must
weigh this new information with statistics and hypothetical
outcomes.
The instructional
booklet to the video game World Series Baseball [for
Sega, 1992] informs the player: "You'll always control
the fielder nearest the ball; when he catches it, it's vital
to think fast and gun it to the cut-off man." The same
booklet asks: "Are you quick enough to turn a screaming
grounder into a 5-4-3 double play?" Likewise, an ad in
a recent ESPN magazine [Sep. '99] informs us:
