The Language of New Media

...and Interactivity Met with Cinema

"The movie, by sheer speeding up the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure. The message of the movie medium is that of transition from linear connections to configurations." (McLuhan, 1994, p.12)

On August 19, 1839, Louis Daguerre, who was already known for his diorama, introduced the new process of "daguerreotype". With this process, some lucky amateurs, for the first time became able to shoot their roof-top silhouettes against the sky. And that is how the media frenzy had begun according to Lev Manovich. Around the same time, in 1833, Charles Babbage began designing a device called "the Analytical Engine." This device is contained most of the key features to the modern digital computer. A processing unit performed operations on some data and the final results were printed out onto a paper. And this can be considered as the first machine to make analytical calculations, in modern words, the first computer. Although these two events continued their development in parallel, for a long time they did not cross into each others paths. Jumping in the history to the 20th century, in 1936, Konrad Zuse, who is a German engineer, began building a computer which was considered to be the first working digital computer. Zuse's innovation was using punched tape to control computer programs, which was actually discarded 35mm movie film. So the year 1936 became the year that the cinema and the computer development crossed into each others path. As the iconic code of the cinema is discarded in the favor of more efficient binary one, this is also how the cinema became a slave to the computer. (Manovich, 2001, p.21-25)

Through the history of the cinema, the directors have searched for better reflection of realism and way of immersing the viewer into the streaming images. Introduction of the perspective, reproduction of photographic images, streaming pictures and even neutral colors were not enough to create the real realism. Even 3-D and I-Max movies did not create the real sense of realism because none of these were able to break the one-way communication between the media and the viewer.

Andrea Bazin can be considered to be one of the first directors to develop a humanist approach to cinema in terms of realism. Instead of combining different shots together to reflect the realism, the used deep-focus cinematography that shows a whole room and even beyond the room in a single frame, where from the nearest point to the far point, all in focus. Bazin he gave the opportunity to the viewer, where the viewer decides where to concentrate on the frame. Thus, the 'different views' were combined in the head of the viewer. However, this was also not enough in terms of 'reality' and the immersion of the viewer into the medium, so it was time to show up some interactivity.

The storyline and narration of a tradition movie is a plain line which holds certain amount of plot points. Plot points are narration elements which carries the important events that change the flow of the story and the narrative situation. In order to break up the traditional narration, the decision of the places of the plot points on the storyline should be left to the viewer. The popular notion of 'interactivity' is to turn these plot points into 'nodes', so that the two dimensional storyline is upgraded into a three dimensional node map. With the changing of plot points into three dimensional node maps, important decisions in the story are no longer made by the 'hero' of the story, but the viewer himself. This means that the traditional movie is altered in a way that it is interrupted from time to time to make the viewer choose among two or more different possibilities on how the story will continue. So that the traditional hero-viewer identification turns into a hero-viewer unity. The first application of this idea was presented on the 1967 Montreal Expo under the name of "Kino-Automat." Radusz Cincera's movie "One Man and his World" was stopped several times to wait for viewer decision on how the story would continue. (Hales, 2002, p.106)

Already for economic reasons, this idea was unsuitable for the conditions of 1967. Besides that it increases the footage required, also this kind of movies could only be shown in specially equipped cinemas, where there are not too much of them in 1967. Although the number of I-Max cinemas increased a lot in the past few years, the idea of Kino-Automat remained as a curiosity in cinema history. Maybe one reason could be that, when the high quality 35mm film projected on a large screen, it occupies a large space in which it is almost impossible to perceive the whole image at a time, but rather the viewer's eyes constantly move to different parts of the screen. This action of viewer keeps him 'active' when compared to watching a television screen which is considerably small in size that puts the viewer into a passive mode which sends to brain into sleep. So that in order to avoid the problem, TV and computer programs encourage the viewer to constantly zap or push the buttons on the keyboard. (Birk, 2002)

Relatively small in size, monitor seems to be the perfect for direct user feedback and this is why games are the most demanded programs. In terms of interactivity, computer games outdoes interactive films because the it uses very flexible audiovisual elements that in the case of 3-D modeled games the scene can be viewed from any angle. However, what games lack is the narrative storytelling. Even if some of the games are supported with 'narrative' elements, there are still a number of gaps between the narrative storytelling and the game's narration. All of the games' stories evolve out of protagonists who act according to the acts of the avatar, and a protagonist that solely acts according to the avatar, cannot have its own soul. Besides, in every game, the user knows that at the end the protagonist will be beaten by the avatar. To avoid this problem, game programmers began to launch games of blockbuster movies, in which the protagonist and the avatar gain their characteristics outside the game. Examples might be 007 James Bond games, The Matrix game or Lara Croft: Tomb Raider game. In this case, the user play a character that she already knows but still the actions of the protagonist runs on a pre-programmed pattern that depends on the actions of the avatar.

Jesper Juul describes computer games as a two layer composition of material and program in which the latter gives a meaningful source to the game's objects (texts, graphics, sounds, etc.) (Juul, 2001). This description