October 9: Comment on Mobilizing the Imagination

A major element of Mizuko Ito's discussion of children's gaming centres around the issue of participation and how players – children in this case – can 'remix' media to suit their own preferences. The question left unasked in the article is whether certain forms of New Media, such as different forms of hardware, can affect the degree to which play is participative. To put it another way, are certain platforms less friendly to 'remixes' than others?

The question is especially relevant to comparisons between Japan and the West, considering, as the author notes, that Western gaming has historically had a much greater focus on the PC, while Japanese gaming has been oriented around consoles and portable gaming. In the West, a vibrant 'modding' community has evolved chiefly because the act of releasing games on the PC inherently puts the developer's code at the mercy of users. Sufficiently motivated players could use the same PC that they employed for gameplay in order to modify and enhance the software. Conversely, most consoles have been extremely unfriendly to modification. Not only have consoles traditionally lacked appropriate input methods, software, and until the advent of the Xbox, storage, but they have also been subject to outright prohibition of modification by the manufacturer. Beginning with the lockout chip on the NES, and continuing to the more recent litigation regarding mod-chips, console makers have attempted preserve their authority over the hardware. Console gamers tend to use their hardware as a consumptive device, purchasing new games when they have completed the old, rather than modifying legacy titles or making new ones themselves. One might posit, albeit with extreme hesitation, that gaming in the West has stressed 'participation' to a much greater degree.

Through the availability of proper tools, and the degree of manufacturer interference then, the degree of 'participation' varies from platform to platform. Another application of McLuhan's “The medium is the message.” perhaps. Speaking personally, I happen to be much more cynical than Ito about the possibilities of new media. With the gradual shift from open, highly customizable platforms such as Windows PCs to closed architecture systems such as phones and tablets, one suspects that the participatory potential of video gaming will decline.