His argument for the “specificity of digital games” focuses particularly on the moment of their dependence on audiovisual technology: “The absolute majority of digital games is based on screens of various kinds.”22
To others, however, such a perspective seems bound to surface similarities, since analog and digital contents are of totally different medialities, even if they appear on the same screens. Dieter Mersch, for instance, writes: “At first sight we seem to be dealing with audiovisual phenomena, which, however, have starkly separated themselves from film or video as they are different not just technologically and mathematically, but in fact in every way.”23 Mersch’s “media theory of the digital game” defines their specificity as their dependence on decision logic: “It determines the foundations of games and sets the mathematical frame of their programs.”24 Mersch indicates thereby a difference of digital games mainly from older audiovisual media.25
Alterity, however, designates more than any arbitrary differences, no matter how peripheral or fundamental they may be. The Latin “alter” describes—for example in the term alter ego or in the words alternative and alternating—a particular other: an other, which stands in a specific and describable relation to a first, a related other. Insofar as “alter” implies a binary relationship, it has to do with (1) the philosophical-historical discussion of the term “alterity” regarding the relationship of an individual or subject to another individual or subject, (2) the relationship between races (considerably in the context of modern relations of Jews and non-Jews as well as postcolonial relations of whites and non-whites), and (3) the relationship between genders. Thus, in the second half of the 20th century, a thread of philosophizing about alterity ran from Emmanuel Levina’s contemplations on the radical alterity of death, which is always experienced as the dying of another,26 to the reflections of his friend Jacques Derrida on memory and sorrow as a destruction of the alterity of the other through internalization.27 Next, trains of thought on the postmodern disposition of media, especially Jean Baudrillard’s work, focused on the fears that medial and networked audiovisual communication in particular—from television to the World Wide Web—would destroy the experience of otherness of subjects and cultures.28 These texts in turn influenced modern gender theory. Judith Butler, for example, understands alterity as “the constitutive outside,”29 against which the respective inside forms itself and finds its identity.
By adapting the term alterity in order to make what it structurally contains fruitful for the historical theory of media, the first half of my assumption claims that digital games are not something entirely different from analog games, but rather that digital games are the specific other of analog games. As a medium, digital games form themselves through their indispensable intermedial relation to the medium of analog games. Only through this experience of alterity were digital games able to find their identity over the course of several decades. The second half of my assumption claims the same relationship—the dichotomous relationship of identity and alterity—between digital games and the linear audiovisions of cinema and television: that digital games are neither the same as nor radically different from linear audiovisions, but that digital games are the specific other of linear audiovisions.
1 Cited in Salen, Katie/Zimmerman, Eric: The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2006, p. 78.
2 Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop, loc. 1638.
3 McGonigal, Jane: Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, New York: Penguin Press (Kindle edition) 2011, loc. 375-389.
4 Huizinga, Johan: Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Boston: Beacon Press (Kindle edition) 1955 (*1938).
5 Caillois, Roger: Man, Play, and Games, New York: Free Press of Glencoe 1961.
6 Avedon, Elliott M./Sutton-Smith, Brian: The Study of Games, New York: J. Wiley 1971; Sutton-Smith, Brian: The Ambiguity of Play, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1997.
7 Salen, Katie/Zimmerman, Eric: Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (Kindle edition) 2003, loc. 934.
8 Ibid., loc. 1281.
9 Ibid., loc. 400.
10 Ibid., loc. 98.
11 Ibid., loc. 311 and loc. 578.
12 Schell, Jesse: The Art of Game Design, loc. 1079.
13 Ibid., loc. 1149.
14 Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al.: Understanding Video Games, loc. 1095; Mäyrä: An Introduction to Game Studies, loc. 580.
15 The necessity of an historical analysis of ahistorical-systematic attempts at definition is stressed by Mäyrä: An Introduction to Game Studies, loc. 550.
16 See Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al.: Understanding Video Games, loc. 1112: “... the definitions say nothing about digital computation and thus are definitions of games and not merely video games.”
17 See, for example, Juul: Half-Real, loc. 103: “[T]he history of video games is partly about breaking with the classic game model.”
18 Ibid., loc. 63: Juul also sees digital games as explicitly outside of the tradition of “cinema, print literature, or new media.”
19 Salen/Zimmerman: Rules of Play, loc. 1358.
20 Mäyrä, Frans: An Introduction to Game Studies, loc. 715.
21 Ibid., loc. 691.
22 Ibid., loc. 812.