To address whether different game genres require different considerations for where their sense of agency lies between the two poles of schema and image, I’ll be taking a look at fighting games like Street Fighter and Super Smash Bros. and then comparing these to action-roleplaying games such as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Bioshock.

In Super Smash Bros. and Street Fighter, the gameplay is driven towards the pole of body schema. The controls for the fighters are mapped to a gamepad and the movements required to play the game rate very low on the complexity of P-actions when taken individually. A P-action will punch, kick, grab, block, jump, or perform some other similar action that involve an input of direction and the action desired. This said, a string of P-actions performed in quick succession correctly can send a grown adult home crying to their parents because your anthropomorphic fox fighting avatar unleashed a flurry of millisecond-fast destruction on to their Italian plumber fighting avatar, thus winning you a competition and roughly $10,000 prize money. These are real things that happen.

Now, the rapidity of translation of action input and action output makes these games extremely fast-paced despite the apparent simplicity of the game itself. This competitive game format combined with a high skill cap often means that the agency of the player resides within their sensory-motor capacities and whether they can respond both quickly and correctly to changing situations while in virtual combat with another player. The responses must be simultaneously consciously considered and automatic, which definitely downplays the importance of body image in these fighting games. While the player can usually reskin their character, the overall appearance and the meaning of the avatars’ actions are not of particular importance.

Above: possibly the greatest moment in video game history. Insane amount of technical skill required to a) block Chun-Li’s fearsome kicks and b) come back and win the game.

Above: if the first video was Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 Prelude in G Major, then this is Lil Wayne’s “A Milli”: equally incredible, significantly more crass. NSFW language.

Now, in third-person and first-person narrative-based roleplaying games, much more emphasis is placed on the body image than the schema. The character on screen, whether playing as Geralt in the Witcher series or Jack in Bioshock, is an extension of your body, and the choices made within that virtual body are identifiable with those of your body. For example, in the Bioshock games, the player is presented with the dilemma of Little Sisters—genetically mutated children who harvest a substance known as ADAM (essentially, potent stem cells) from the dead bodies that are scattered around Rapture, a failed Objectivist undersea city-society (I know, right?). The player can either cure them by injecting a serum into them that cures them of their mutation, or they can kill them and harvest their ADAM reserves (because this functions as currency for superpowers and the like in-game). Now, regardless of what you choose, the game is first-person, and the player witnesses the choices made through the interface played out on screen. This presents the issue of “well, would I do this in this situation? Would I physically perform these actions?”, and it is this issue that gives many players pause the first time these games. In The Witcher, the player embodies Geralt, a monster hunter with what essentially amounts to no defined moral code. The player is often put into situations where they are presented with a set of choices, usually during dialogue, where there is no clear-cut right answer. In this sense, the player must reflect upon their body image and what they could picture themselves actually doing in such a situation.

by Harrison Thomas and Alfredo Olazaba

1. What are the defining differences between postmodernism and modernism?
2. How does the act of “quoting,” whether referring to texts, clothing, or general style, create a “distancing irony?” Give an example of this.
3. Postmodernism asserts that identity is performed, and the physical body is imagined to be easily transformed. Give an example of a public figure incorporating these postmodern ideals into their identity, and the processes by which they do this.
4. What is a genre parody? How does it function? Give an example.
5. Are musical acts such as Radiohead and The Smiths that behave subversively within the system of the music industry effective in achieving their goals? Argue why or why not.

The main focus of our transition from the second unit to the third unit of our class appears to be what constitutes the New Media, how it functions, and how it affects us. In Lev Manovich’s essay “New Media from Borges to HTML,” the author explores the character of New Media and offers a variety of definitions for it based on its function and its history. YouTube is a unique and nuanced platform that functions as emblematic of New Media, with a recursive nature that encourages community-building and interaction with previously created media.

YouTube, as outlined in William Uricchio’s essay “The Future of a Medium Once Known as Television,” appears to fulfill Manovich’s proposition of New Media as “metamedia” in an interesting way (Manovich 20). YouTube is a chimerical beast that interacts with traditional media such as television and film, while remaining distinctively outside of them, primarily by “[seizing] the periphery, providing access to the scene even more consistently than to the films (or television shows) themselves” (Uricchio 30). YouTube is a haven more for videos and content that are about the source (whether filmic, related to television, or games) than the source itself, even if someone were to create an original short film or series of episodes.

In the Manovich essay, he theorizes that “the new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways but rather with accessing and using in new ways previously accumulated media” (Manovich 23). This is why one can see a single, original work spawn an extremely high number of “periphery” content, ranging from reaction videos to remixes to video essays to simple text-based comments. YouTube appears to be a haven for the postmodern act of “reworking already existing content, idioms, and style, rather than genially creating new ones” (23).

Uricchio claims that YouTube “misses the capacity for televisual liveness,” meaning (I believe) that since the platform is reliant on the “publishing” of content, which means that once the content is created and put onto the platform, it remains there, forever accessible (Uricchio 32). This function facilitates the recursive creation of content from other content, since these artifacts can be found if one knows how to search for them, thus fulfilling this qualification to be considered New Media according to Manovich (of course, his qualifications are more descriptive than prescriptive).

What makes YouTube a particularly fascinating platform is that this act of recursively creating content from other content opens up a discourse on a subject that had, up until the commercialization of the personal computer, not experienced the same degree of freedom it has today. There has always been a sense of community-building in the manner with which individuals interact with content and create content based off of it (consider, for example, fan letters and theories in reaction to Golden Age science fiction periodicals), which has certain implications for the postmodern movement if it is to be considered as emblematic of it. Perhaps the postmodern act of “using in new ways previously accumulated media” is an act of identification rhetoric: by interacting with old media and others who interact with the same media and perform generative acts of content-creation, communities are built. Just a thought though.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is possibly the best study of the constructed ethos in opposition to the situated ethos that exists in the public political realm. Due to a significant political career spanning decades, the public figure of HRC can function as an artifact of visual rhetoric, and is interesting in that she is a study of the political Other that exists within the establishment. Recently, during her run for the presidency and before as the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has taken a more hands-on approach to her public image and has used her administrative sway, the inertia of her career, and her relationship to the media to empower her invented ethos as a powerful political figure.

The idea of the Other as a psychoanalytic and critical concept is directly applicable to Hillary’s situated ethos: up until perhaps the past decade, much of her political existence has been defined in relation to other individuals. Unless my understanding of the concept is flawed, which it may very well be, given feminist critical theory the Other’s existence is defined by the Subject. In the case of Bill Clinton as the President of the United States, he was the Subject and HRC the Other. Granted, HRC exercised her agency as the First Lady in order to attempt healthcare reform, but as the Parry-Giles essay notes, “the White House associated the First Lady more with children’s issues,” which is an example of an institution directing the figure of the non-Subject to what it feels is best: in this case, the “good mother” (377). She was looked up to in relation to “images of feminism, power, and fear” at the time, and yet she was not in complete control of her own image. This rose to a boiling point during the Lewinsky scandal, as her reaction to her husband’s infidelity was watched closely, and she became the figure of the “supportive wife” (378). Again, HRC is not the focus of the media, and her presence is defined by her husband’s actions and the actions of the institution he represents.

Ever since the conclusion of Bill’s presidency, HRC seized her agency and commanded her image far more and has moved from the figure of the Other into the Subject. As a Senator, Secretary of State, and presidential candidate, she has more often appeared visually divorced from her husband in media, usually with a stellar smile on her face (this depends on the network/site of course). While she is still a controversial person in power, as evidenced by the Whitewater, Benghazi, and her most recent email scandals, she nevertheless maintains a level of security in her image, which is proven by her popularity as a Democratic presidential candidate. Without having a popular public image, she wouldn’t have a chance.

HRC remains the example of visual rhetoric that we have studied to possess the most depth. Considering that the majority (last I checked) of the students in the class have chosen to write on her for their discussion posts, I feel that her figure is an excellent springboard into further discussion of rhetoric, primarily with regard to the study of ethos.