I'm an Intruder

"Intruder" was really kinda depressing. A lot of emotions went through my head as I "played" it. Actually, the first time I explored it was at ITS. I went there with a friend to print out some articles (including "Remediation). While I was waiting for her to get all of her stuff squared away, I just fired it up. There is no audio on the computers there - which in reflection is a really smart idea in a communal technology center - and because of this my reaction to it was disturbingly different from what it would be the second time around.

As I played, I was bombarded with phrases on the screen. Due to the resolution of the flash program and the speed at which the text was traveling, I found it quite difficult to read and eventually I had pretty much given up hope of catching more than about 10% of it. I was somewhat entertained by the games, even though I couldn't really figure out the point/rules of some (and the vagina dropping strange objects out of it was quite confusing for me, too). I made it to the football one when my friend was ready to go.

So I came back to it this evening on my computer with my speakers and my reaction was... quite different. I'll be totally honest and say that I am a big gamer, and because of this I naturally gravitated towards the visual/gaming aspect of the experience. As I continued to play though, I started picking up bits and pieces of the story being told ("killed a man," "whore house") and I began feeling quite uncomfortable. I felt like I was a child playing a video game and feeling very uncomfortable while two adults (parents?) were arguing nearby. I felt like I was listening in on something that was not meant for me to hear (I was, for all intents and purposes, and intruder), and because of this I tried to pull myself further into the game, using the stimulus of it to drown out whatever else was going on.

Then I started realizing that, for some games, the story wouldn't continue until you messed up (the football one and the girl jumping over the hole, for instance). I was trying to do well in these games so that I would be spared from listening to it.

The games themselves were very simple, and reminded me of playing the atari on Saturday mornings. For me, that's a really innocent and comforting memory. The final game really bothered me, though. I thought of footage I had seen of US helicopter pilots gunning down several people (the video can be found here... it's rather disturbing, so heads up). This particular game drew a connection between my happy atari memory and the helicopter footage, and that made me uneasy.

Now! How this relates to the "Remediation" article in my head: I think that "Intruder" is an example of something that's hypermediated. I was hit with a deluge of stimuli. So much so that it seems impossible for me to absorb all of it. This is remedied slightly in this case by the fact that I could watch "Intruder" several times in order to take in as much as I could. In much of hypermediated mainstream media, the viewer is constantly being smacked in the face by information. "Remediation" was obviously written a few years ago... yes, I just leaned over and checked... so it was obviously written 5 years ago. The big tipoff for me was the screenshot of CNN. It was being used as an example of a source of information that has been hypermediated, and yet it looks almost spartan when compared to today's MSNBC CBS ABC AOL... I grow tired of typing these names... I just found it quite entertaining to see how far we've progressed as a culture as far as 24-hour news is concerned.


On another note, Blogger's coding for posting messages is really getting on my nerves. It tried to turn all my text into a hyperlink. I also like courier because it makes me feel like a writer of some sort. If it's too much of an eyesore drop me a line and I change it up.