Today many people find themselves sitting in the dark behind the glow of a television or computer screen for countless hours navigating through the space of a video game or the internet. Lev Manovich describes this navigation through virtual space as a form of new media. As a form of media there is a user and an interface, for example in the virtual navigable space of video games like Doom and Myst. Baudrillard looks at theme parks, such as Disneyland, to discuss physically simulated virtual spaces. This paper will examine the analogous relationship for the participant in each of these virtual spaces. Specifically how both of these weightless, simulated spaces are determined by the individual trajectories of its users.
First this paper will look at Manovich’s formulation of navigable space as a new media that splits a user. Next will follow a discussion of Baudrillard’s theory on Disneyland concerning a physically divided visitor of virtual space. These two theories of virtual space come together on the topics of usership and incoherent space. In virtual space, the user works and plays at creating a coherent subject for which our fragmented reality does not offer.
Navigable space makes the category of space a form of new media. Manovich describes new media as “graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, and texts that have become computable; that is, they comprise simply another set of computer data.”[i] As a form of new media, navigable or virtual space calls for the user to experience or operate space. However, that user’s doing of space splits the viewer between his or her avatar in Myst and his or her corporeal being holding the mouse. In Myst we move through various activities granting us into higher levels, while in Doom the player is able to manipulate and build upon the system. These tactile activities create a haptic space within the video game as the player holds the mouse and plays.
While obviously Baudrillard’s discussion of Disneyland concerns a physical virtual space, his points resonate with Manovich’s video gamer. A similar experience occurs with visitors to theme parks. Upon entering the gates of the park, the participant leaves behind him or herself in reality and becomes a character absorbed by the reality constructed around them. Baudrillard writes about how Disneyland is an imaginary, a play of illusions about American space: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.”[ii] The visitor to Disneyland takes on the reality of a subject in America, thus enforcing actual subjectivity outside of Disneyland. Yet the exterior subjectivity has become a form of hyperreality or a simulation of reality that appears more real than reality.
These two theorists come together over the dividedness of usership in these virtual spaces. In theme parks there is a physical distinction between the outside and the inside, the visitor enters and leaves the park grounds. In video games or virtual space the player is abstractly outside of reality, and therefore the player internalizes the reality of the simulation in his or her play. This internalization of the virtual is our “virtual mobilized gaze,”[iii] in the words of Anne Friedberg. This mobile gaze formulates that the work done online or in Myst, as navigators, produces space. Baudrillard would consider this an effort to create a coherent totality for which reality does not offer. Disneyland does not offer a real totalized space, as much as the separate levels of Doom. No matter how actively the participant engages that space, he or she is only navigating through a set of discrete objects or levels.
Another point of contact is that both theorists see space as no longer a coherent totality. To make up for this failure in coherency and this split subjectivity, the player in virtual space becomes the event of the game or the park. In virtual games, the player accesses information through the tool of individual navigation. This personal visualizing of information is necessary for the game to continue. Space is no longer systematic and coherent space of the past. In the dense matrix of objects that radiate isotropically in navigable space, the player chooses how to manage his or her space. In this sense, Manovich’s navigable space is a non-space similar to Baudrillard’s simulation. Simulation, for Baudrillard, is a real that is not real, that is not even representative or modeled after a real, but a set of referentials. The navigator builds and alters reality by choosing his or her own trajectory through sets of discrete objects. The player never and controls the game, but believes otherwise during navigation of those referential objects of reality.
When the game turns off, the internet browser closed, or the theme park gates locked, the user’s trajectory ends and returns back to reality. The split user is left fragmented between reality and hyperreality. However, navigable space is not a closed system, but an open network, a matrix of freedom and control. Since we decide our personal trajectories and space forms around that course, our inbetween state is relieved in navigable space. Although it does not piece together reality for us and may be a mere distraction, in navigable space we play at coherent subjectivity and get a break from our broken identities.
