New Media: Databases Dressed to Impress

When I was about 11 years old, my dad bought my brother and me this really cool new game, Doom . Similar to Wolfenstein 3D, which we had been playing for about a year, we "were" the main character, seeing and doing everything from his perspective, exploring, killing bad guys, and getting to the next level. We had lots of fun playing that game for about a month, and got pretty good at it, until the gory, realistic graphics gave me nightmares, and we weren't allowed to play it anymore. Little did I know that 1993 was such a big year for the video game. Doom ended up being the granddaddy of the popularization of "first person" video games.


In Lev Manovich's 2001 book, The Language of New Media (which can be found in its entirety online), Doom and Myst (which also came out in 1993) are used as examples of "how computer games use — and extend — cinematic language (91)." Doom and Myst both used "cinematics" to create mood and realistic feel for the worlds they were depicting. Manovich argues that New Media as a whole borrows most of what it is from pieces of traditional media, especially cinema. Doom and Myst for example have opening credits and back stories. The player gets to be the main character, acting out the rest of the story to achieve the goal.

In fact, Manovich contends that a lot of what people see as differentiators between new and traditional media actually existed before new media. For example, multimedia display (which Bolter and Grusen would call Hypermediation) is not a unique hallmark of new media, because "sound and text (be it intertitles of the silent era or the title sequences of the later period) [has been around] for a whole century. Cinema thus was the original modern 'multimedia'(67)." He also refutes the idea that in contrast to traditional media where the order of presentation was fixed, the user can now interact with a media object, by evoking "ellipses in literary narration, missing details of objects in visual art and other representational 'shortcuts' required the user to fill-in the missing information (71)."

So what is new media? For one thing, Manovich argues that most new media objects are at the heart, databases. They store information to be accessed by the user. Whether the new media is in the form of a website, video game, or a mobile phone OS, new media devices

appear as a collections of items on which the user can perform various operations: view, navigate, search. The user experience of such computerized collections is therefore quite distinct from reading a narrative or watching a film or navigating an architectural site (194).

This is especially true for the web, which, no matter what the packaging of the website, it is in the end a way of displaying a collection of data. Social Media sites are collections of profiles and status updates for the user to access and interact with. News sites are again, databases of stories to search and read. Even gaming websites are collections of data for the user to interact with, but they exemplify better Manovich's other attribute of new media: the algorithm.

Most computer games have at least some kind of narrative or goal, which the player strives to achieve. In order to attain that goal, the player must figure out and perform the game's algorithm. For example, "when a new block appears, rotate it in such a way so it will complete the top layer of blocks on the bottom of the screen making this layer disappear (197)," is the algorithm for Tetris. Narratives, one of the results of algorithms in new media, are in some ways the opposites of databases. However, I submit that narratives need databases in order to exist. Even if the data is in a specific order to be given out in a specific way, it is still needed. And the algorithm is what holds the two together.

"In Doom and Myst — and in a great many other computer games — narrative and time itself are equated with the movement through 3D space, the progression through rooms, levels, or words (215)." This story-telling through interacting with visuals in "space" instead of only seeing or reading about them is a key element of new media. Manovich likes to talk about video games, but computer Operating Systems are also prime examples of this feature. Computer desktops contain icons that, when clicked, take the user to organized folders, documents, programs, or the Internet. All are laid out in space the way the user arranges them. Websites are also often navigable spaces meant to be explored, for example JK Rowling's Official Website. Although, like most websites it is at heart a database of news and information about the author, it is set up as her office, to be explored and interacted with to get the full experience.

So, according to Manovich, what really sets new media apart from old media is its computer-ness. Although it reflected cinema in its look and its story-telling and books and board games in its interactivity, Doom, as scary and "realistic" as it was, required a computer to be created and to function. It was after all, just a database dressed to impress.