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2 Games in the Modern Era. A Short Media History

Games are media, this much seems indisputable. Still, it is seldom attempted to situate analog or digital games in the context of the history and theory of media. Quite clearly, however, digital games are positioned in the continuity of modern audiovisuality.1 In particular, they are the latest step in the process of the steady rationalization of image and sound production aimed at perspectival realism that began in the Renaissance. As photography, film, and video did before, digital games have made this process faster, simpler, and cheaper: It started with painterly realism, moved to photorealism and now has reached hyperrealism: from Alberti’s perspectival window view—“una finestra aperta”2—, which had to be manually constructed with great effort, to analog photography, which semi-automated the production of still and moving pictures, to real-time image generation via 3D engines. Just as the industrial media of film and television did not signify a radical break from the preindustrial medium of theater, but rather continued its aesthetic interests in numerous ways on a higher technological level—for instance the optical functionalization of the gaze or the century-long striving for an audiovisual synthesis, a total work of art—, in the same way current digital forms of play are more than just distantly related to older forms of media such as theater, film, and television.

GAMES

In fact, historically speaking, games have been around far longer than all other forms of audiovisual representation. They are, as Chris Crawford argues in his “Phylogeny of Play,” older than mankind.3 Many animal species simulate real world movements and actions, such as hunting, in order to practice them in relative safety. To play in such a manner and to go beyond and develop more complex, rule-governed games appears to also be a fundamental tendency of Homo sapiens. Board games such as SENET (Egypt, 3100 BCE) or the ROYAL GAME OF UR (Sumer, 2600 BCE) belong to the earliest evidence of human culture. In 5th century BCE, the Greek historian Herodot described how, supposedly, 700 years earlier the Lydians in Asia Minor, who are also credited with the invention of money, survived long periods of starvation through the use of board, dice, and many other games and then finally, with one last game, found a solution that insured the survival of the entire community.4 The game design theoretician Jane McGonigal speculates about the future of digital games by appealing to the historical function of analog games:

“When Herodotus looked back, he saw games that were large-scale systems, designed to organize masses of people and make an entire civilization more resilient. I look forward to a future in which massively multiplayer games are once again designed in order to reorganize society in better ways, and to get seemingly miraculous things done.”5

Such positive use and valuation of games correlates with equally continuous, fundamental criticism and recurring attempts at banning them. Frans Mäyrä speaks of the “continuous history of bans or restrictions on games playing.”6 In the western and Christian-influenced modern era they range from the numerous attempts by British kings between the 14th and 16th century to ban soccer, to the ban of pinball machines in New York from the 1930s to the 1970s, all the way to the present, constantly flaring up cries to ban violent videogames. From a historical perspective, Jesper Juul writes, “the current preoccupation with the assumed dangers of video games is a clear continuation of a long history of regulation of games as such …”7 The culture war surrounding play and specific forms of games shapes the social framework for the theoretically-oriented media history of games in the modern era, which I will attempt to outline in this chapter.

The categorical framework I will apply goes back to Harry Pross’s study on media research from the 1970s.8 In it Pross identifies different medialities in accordance with “the apparatus of the messaging system,”9 i.e., in accordance with the extent to which technology is implemented and used. However, since the availability of technologies and of techniques is subject to constant change in different cultures, Pross’s approach has the advantage of operating both systematically and historically at the same time. Thereby his theory of mediality allows for the understanding of the history of media as a process of progressive accumulation and differentiation.

PRIMARY, SECONDARY, AND TERTIARY MEDIALITY

Primary media do not require any technology. They “depend on bringing together special skills within a person.”10 In regard to communication media, Pross includes gestures and mimicry as well as pre-language and language-based sounds. Concerning forms of primary media that convey aesthetic experiences, he names rituals and ceremonies, among others. “The one thing they all have in common is the lack of an intermediate apparatus between the sender and receiver and that the human senses are sufficient for the production, transportation, and consumption of the message.”11 According to Pross’s criteria—even if he does not name them—pre-technical variants of the theater, such as improvisational theater and street theater, as well as games that function without technology, belong to primary media: for instance, movement games like TAG and HIDE-AND-SEEK or games of skill, such as ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS.

Addressing secondary media, Pross writes: “The communicator requires an apparatus.”12 This refers to images such as drawings, paintings, caricatures, or photographs, also coins and paper money bills, as well as texts like letters, leaflets, flyers, books, newspapers, and magazines. Secondary media, of course, already existed for millennia before the Renaissance. In modern times, however, they received a three-fold push in their evolution:

1 In the textual realm: through book printing that allowed for standardized reproduction of texts in greater numbers for the first time;

2 In regard to the image: through the mathematically-based perspective technique, which led to a visual realism that was previously unattainable;

3 In terms of audiovisual representation: through the accumulation of numerous mechanical technologies employed in the creation of unprecedented theater structures, including sets painted and arranged in perspective, hoists and lifting platforms, curtains, and the perspectival-oriented seating arrangements for the manipulation of the audience’s gaze—the sum of which resulted in a new audiovisual realism.

As a modern complement to the church nave that was the central phantasmatic and public sacred space of the agrarian era, the theater and its proscenium or picture-frame stage advanced to become the central phantasmatic and public secular space of individual reflection, education, and self-understanding by the end of the mechanical era—a time characterized by gradual secularization. The new horizon opened up by the realistic audiovisual imitation of life turned the stage into the leading medium of the age:

“Drama, in a glittering succession of figures ranging from Shakespeare and Calderon to Racine, then dominated the literature of the West. It was the fashion to liken the world to a stage on which every man plays his part.”13

At the same time games of secondary mediality—especially board and card games like CHESS or BLACKJACK—underwent a continual process of standardization, facilitated by the production of games through print and other mechanical means and the establishment of local, regional, national, and finally international distribution. The Industrial Age brought about the invention of numerous new games of secondary mediality as well—from the distinctly Prussian WAR GAME (1824) to the distinctly American MONOPOLY (1933) to DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS (1974). Although most of these new creations were identifiable as an expression of specific national (sub-)cultures, they nevertheless found massive, even intercultural, distribution.

Parallel to this, completely new tertiary media, in which “both the sender and receiver require apparatuses,”14 arose through industrial technology. Harry Pross names the electric telegraph as the first tertiary medium. It was followed by, among others, the telephone, the gramophone, animated and live action film, audio and video recording on magnetic tape. In particular, the industrial broadcast media radio and television changed how and what people played in a lasting way. Live transmission transformed sport and competition games of first and secondary mediality—like SOCCER and FOOTRACES, BLACKJACK and CHESS—from local events, in which participants and audience were physically present, into national and international events, which were passively experienced by millions. Furthermore broadcast media created a variety of new spectator games that were staged purely for radio and television.

Many of these radio and TV shows sought to involve not only studio guests directly, but also—through remedial media—a select few representatives of the ‘absent’ and passively situated radio and television audience. An especially interesting example was presented by the German game show DER GOLDENE SCHUSS (1964-1970), which was adapted for British TV as THE GOLDEN SHOT (1967-1975). Viewers of this show could call in to control and shoot an apparatus that consisted of a crossbow connected to a camera. This innovative combination of a new visual perspective and interactivity can be seen as an anticipation of experiences that would be delivered a few decades later by online first-person shooters. Through the transmission of sporting events as well as quiz and game shows, whose adaptation to the needs of radio and television transformed them from games of secondary mediality into ones of tertiary mediality, broadcast media created the largest shared experiences of industrial culture over several decades.

The medial difference between games can, thereby, be determined with respect to their mode of representation:

 Games of primary mediality such as CATCH are based on a real simulation of reality;

 Games of secondary mediality such as CHESS are based on a symbolic representation of reality;

 Games of tertiary mediality, such as radio and television broadcasts of sporting events or quiz shows are based on a medial representation and adaptation of games of primary and secondary mediality, i.e., they allow for tele-audio­visual participation—mostly passive and remote—in edited simulations of reality as well as edited symbolic representations of reality.

The role of players and that of the audience differ radically across medialities: games of primary and secondary mediality allow players, as well as physically present observers, to engage in interactions that are partly self-determined and partly determined by others, whereas the proportional relation between audience and players remained relatively equal through the early 20th century. Games of tertiary mediality, on the other hand, do not only lead to an audience of millions watching a few players, they also subjugate the tiny minority of players to diverse medial regimes—from the selection of which sporting event to broadcast all the way to the live direction of several cameras and their perspectives through which every “real” game play is audiovisually fragmented and distorted.

CASE STUDY:

SOCCER—A GAME’S JOURNEY THROUGH MEDIALITIES

The historical process, in which individual forms of play accumulate numerous medial forms, can be demonstrated with the example of SOCCER, the “most universal cultural phenomenon in the world”15 and at the same time a central “sector of the global entertainment industry.”16 Estimates from the international soccer association FIFA say that at the start of the 21st century there were a billion active soccer players and 50 million referees, while the total length of white lines painted on soccer fields across the world could cover 25 million kilometers, “enough to circle the earth over a thousand times.”17 The beginnings of the game were less spectacular.

Pre-technical and largely unregulated variants can still be observed today when players kick around rocks or round fruit, such as apples, oranges, and melons. The game advanced from primary to secondary mediality around 4,000 years ago with the handcrafting of the first—still solid—balls from various materials, including leather and rubber, and the development of basic rules.18 However, the various ball games from Asia to Middle America emerged within the socio-cultural context of religious rites and warlike conflicts:

“Sometimes a substitute for war, the game could also provide its denouement as defeated opponents first played the game before being sacrificed—their heads cut off or their hearts torn out.”19

The preference to play ball games not with one’s hands but rather with one’s feet originated in prehistoric times as well as antiquity and continued through modern European times via Celtic cultures, as they maintained some independence from the Christian, game-hostile Middle Ages:

“All appear to have played large-scale and often riotous ball games in large open spaces with innumerable participants divided into two teams trying to get the ball to a particular place with few formalities or restrictions.20 […] Often the games were played between two parishes or villages, the ball carried across the open fields between them.21 […] It was certainly violent enough for deaths and injuries to be recorded.”22

The historical process through which SOCCER found its modern form began in the British public schools of the 18th and early 19th centuries, especially at Rugby and Eton. Athletic activities in general and SOCCER in particular played a prominent role in both Rugby and Eton’s curriculum as well as in the establishment of their self-image. In order to enable tournaments, a successive codification and standardization of rules had to be set in place, first within schools and then between different schools. In a second step SOCCER burst from the upper-class and upper-middle-class world of these schools into broader population groups: “Almost from the moment of its codification football was colonized by the British working classes as both players and spectators.”23

In Great Britain, the homeland of industrialization, the popularization of SOCCER followed the examples set by sports like horse racing, rowing, boxing, or cricket, which were already entrenched in the aristocratic and merchant classes: first agreement by different clubs on common rules and procedures, then formation of leagues, and then establishment of regional and national championships. The important standardization of the ball—its size, material, and quality—occurred in 1872.24 The role of the field referee was introduced in 1881, though he only attained his current function in 1898.25 In 1882 the goal gained a crossbar, in 1892 a net.26 Since the mid-1880s amateurs were slowly replaced with paid professionals despite standing bans on the practice. At the start of the First World War around 5,000 professionals earned their living with SOCCER.27

In the context of this professionalization of the most popular sport of industrial culture, the medialization of SOCCER took place as well. A first step consisted of—as it did already in the modern medialization of the theater—the construction of specialized buildings that allowed ever-larger numbers of people to follow the game from a variety of perspectives which were at least tolerable. Within a few decades these novel soccer stadiums in Great Britain reached and exceeded the capacity of the previously largest entertainment structure in human history: the Roman Coliseum with its 50,000-80,000 seats. The 1907 completed stadium in Glasgow, for example, then the largest in the world, could house over 120,000 spectators.28

Concurrently, various attempts were carried out to make soccer games, or at least their final scores, available to those who could not be there in person. Since the 1880s important results were transmitted via telegraph to faraway cities in order to announce them in post offices, restaurants, and bars.29 SOCCER newspapers and magazines sprung up and reached ever-higher circulation numbers. For example, the weekly newspaper Scottish Referee, founded in 1888, circulated 500,000 copies in the first decade of the 20th century, at a time when Scotland had around five million residents.30 In 1907, the British Daily Mail published the first photos of soccer games.31

The crucial next step of this medialization resided in the live broadcasting of games. On the radio this took place for the first time in January of 1927, three weeks after the founding of the BBC.32 And so SOCCER arrived in tertiary mediality. The first transmission via television, again through the BBC in an experimental broadcasting operation, happened only a decade later in September 1937.33 In the founding years of television, the 1950s and 1960s, SOCCER and television entered into a symbiotic relationship—at least in Great Britain and continental Europe: Next to the transmission of game and entertainment shows as well as the broadcasting of motion pictures, SOCCER decisively contributed to television’s status as the new defining medium of the era. Vice versa the integration of sports into tertiary mass media through live-broadcasts, announcements in news programs, and special sport shows ensured that SOCCER went from being a proletarian participation game of British provinces to a global game that excited all classes and was experienced by the majority of humanity as spectators.

With the rise of analog-electronic and then digital games since the 1960s, SOCCER inevitably migrated to this medium as well. The first electro-mechanical soccer game CROWN SOCCER SPECIAL came out in 1967.34 Many other arcade and PC games followed. The decisive breakthrough of SOCCER into virtuality, however, occurred only with soccer manager and soccer simulator games starting in the 1990s. Of these ANSTOSS—DER FUSSBALLMANAGER (1993-2006), FIFA INTERNATIONAL SOCCER and FIFA (since 1993) as well as PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER (since 2001) were the most successful. Of the diverse incarnations of the FIFA series alone, Electronic Arts sold over 100 million copies, by their own account.35 In this way digital soccer games ushered in a new phase of massively active participation, which was no longer played out in reality, but in virtuality. SOCCER seems to be transforming anew from a spectator to a player sport. Whoever enters a living room today and sees people in front of an HD screen cannot—at least from some distance—immediately discern whether a match is ‘running’ and being ‘watched’ or if the supposed spectators are playing the game themselves.

QUATERNARY MEDIALITY:

FROM SPECTATOR TO PLAYER

When Harry Pross presented his taxonomy of mediality a half-century ago the development of the digital transmedium—especially in the context of European culture—was hardly predictable. In this respect his theories need to be expanded and even partially corrected to account for our current situation. Tertiary media required, as Pross recognized, technology on both sides of the communication process. But with regard to digitalization, the tertiary broadcast and reception technology need to be defined more clearly. The analog mass media radio and television allowed merely the transmission of fixed and standardized works in one direction: from a few producers or broadcasters to many consumers or receivers. Those watching and listening could not ‘send back.’ They were, therefore, incapable of interacting with those offering the content nor with the offered content itself or with other listeners or viewers. Therefore, Pross’s definition of tertiary mediality has to be expanded beyond the current perspective in respect to the fact that the technology used for broadcast media is principally one-way technology. It does not empower the receiver with any sort of responsive or interactive capability and, vice versa, hinders the broadcaster and the content being broadcasted from receiving any responses.36

In the course of digitalization yet another mediality came into being that uses technology on both ends of the communication process, yet has back channels at its disposal—whether this potential for interaction is placed at the user’s disposal or not. For also under the conditions of digital production and distribution the creators of linear audiovisions follow the tradition of film and its artistic prerogatives. Whether they continue to operate in the context of traditional offline media of film and television or already in online media, they present their audiences a final cut version as a closed work. They reserve, therefore, for themselves and their creative manipulation of software files the inherent interactive possibilities of the transmedium. Game designers, on the other hand, integrate the capability of interacting with particular elements of digital audiovisions through the interface of their games, and furthermore, they often give players control over deeper changes in the game via so-called Mods or modifications.

From a media historical perspective, therefore, quaternary mediality37, i.e., the transition to the digital transmedium and its multichannel communication, directly influences the production as well as the reception of audiovisions. For one, it initiates a fusing of the creative authority that characterizes the manual production of imagery with the qualities of industrial reproduction. From the 1970s through the 1980s the technical and aesthetic development of hyperrealistic audiovisuality occurred primarily in the context of the—American—motion picture industry and on the technical basis of pre-rendering. However, since the 1990s, game engines have been realizing the potential of quaternary mediality for the real-time generation of virtual images and sounds—in nearly ‘photorealistic’, i.e., lifelike quality.38

Secondly, the integration and drastic escalation of reception methods associated with primary, secondary, and tertiary mediality were attained on the side of the receivers or users. In virtuality, it is possible for the first time to almost arbitrarily choose and switch between other-determined, self-determined, and interactive use of medial artifacts. Thereby it appears that the digital transmedium is ushering in a historical turnaround, or perhaps a reversal, to a mode of thinking in regard to the culturally dominant behavior towards aesthetic artifacts.

The sweeping immobilization of the audience—in the theater, the museum, the movie theater, in front of radio and television—was, as is generally known, an achievement of industrial culture. Until late in the 19th century, for example, theater auditoriums were not darkened. Contemporary illustrations and descriptions document to what degree the audience, who could see and hear each other and understood attending the theater as a social event, interacted among each other and even with the actors, whether by praising or heckling them. It was Richard Wagner in Bayreuth who first introduced collective tunnel vision from the darkened auditorium toward the stage. For reasons of aesthetic contemplation, his arrangement constituted a proto-cinematic form of reception that the movies would later require for technical reasons.

The early cinema was then also faced with the difficult task of preventing the audience—now mostly from the middle and lower classes—from general uproar and outbursts of dissatisfaction, especially from throwing objects at the actors, i.e., the projection screen, as theater attendees were accustomed to doing at live performances. The obvious connection between what the new industrial media demanded of their audiences, and what the industrial way of life demanded in general, has often been commented on.39 A relatively clear line from the training for physical and communicative passivity combined with the necessity to pay exceptional attention to quickly changing situations in art and entertainment, can be traced to a dual phenomenon: first, the experiences enabled by new transportation methods such as railroad and automobiles; secondly, the challenges of industrial work that relied on standardized, passive behavior that seemed to almost be controlled remotely but had to be, of course, self-controlled.

In contrast, digital knowledge work is characterized by acting independently in the creative, also thoroughly exploratory, and thereby playful, manipulation of software programs and files and their virtual symbols.40 From this perspective it is hardly surprising that at the same rate as empowered knowledge work—especially in the so-called ‘creative industries’—is becoming the most important source of economic growth, so, too, are changes in cultural behavior toward aesthetic artifacts taking shape. Playfulness, which was important in pre-industrial times, was forced by industrialization into the private sphere (and from there expelled to the edges of what was considered high culture)—with some good reason, considering the violence and danger arising from industrial machines and processes. In an attempt to belittle games in comparison to books, Harry Pross wrote: “In the […] sector […] of free-time and incompetence, the game is at home in numerous forms.”41 From there, however, it is returning—in the course of a “movement from a culture of calculation to a culture of simulation”42—into the center of postindustrial civilization. The contradiction between work-ethic and play-ethic that industrial rationality assumed, and that existed in factories as well as in bureaucracies, is gradually dissipating.

With some consequence the phantasmic secular space, in which digital knowledge workers collect their aesthetic experiences, is no longer to be found in material reality but rather in virtuality. There, the process of dematerializing dislocation that began with the movies comes to completion: where on stage human beings of flesh and blood stand, the cinema projects images of light. Online, spectators and actors alike are now also shedding their corporeality in favor of mediated presences by turning into virtual co-players. In this way games profit from the changing nature of work in digital culture. The readiness to be passively entertained over long periods of time is on the decline, while inversely, the readiness for interactive participation is on the rise. Players see the need for making your own decisions that analog and digital games require not as a burden but rather as a pleasure.

Today we must, therefore, differentiate between games of primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary mediality. Games of primary mediality are based on real simulations of reality, those of secondary mediality on symbolic representations of reality, and those of tertiary mediality on tele-auditive or tele-audio­visual participation at real simulations of reality as well as symbolic representations of reality. In contrast, digital games now enable interactive participation not only at virtual, real-time simulations of symbolic representations of reality, but also, most importantly, at virtual, real-time, and hyperrealistic simulations of the imaginary.

Because of these singular medial characteristics, digital games seem to correspond to the experiences of cultural digitalization more fully than other forms of representation and storytelling: digital games relate to the changing ways of perceiving time and space and to new conceptions of how, under the requirements of digital production and communication, humans have to be and act.

The three successive developmental pushes in which the new digital medium gained its current characteristics, between the mid-20th and the start of the 21st century, will be presented in the next three chapters.

1 The German noun ‘Spiel’ can mean both game and play (which includes both connotations of ‘play’ as they are found in English usage, i.e., leisure activity and theater); the verb ‘spielen’ can express both the acts of playing as well as acting or performing. So already the German language itself reveals the shared origins and ongoing aesthetic proximity of ‘Spiel’ to the most important variations of audiovisual representation in modern times: from the stage play (Bühnenspiel) with its subcategories of comedy (Lustspiel), tragic drama (Trauerspiel), music play/drama (Singspiel) or festival (Festspiel) a clear line connects to the moving picture (Lichtspiel), which appeared around 1900 in both of its variations—the fiction film (Spielfilm) and the documentary film, which gave way to the television show (Fernsehspiel) and the video and computer game (Videospiel and Computerspiel). Moritz Lazarus remarked already in 1883, “that the etymology of the German word ‘Spiel’ indicates a light, aimlessly floating, self-returning movement, a movement that is not caught in a narrowly focused action and is not directed toward an approaching goal, but rather is concerned with the here and there, and the back and forth between polar positions.” (Cited from Krämer, Sybille: “Ist Schillers Spielkonzept unzeitgemäß? Zum Zusammenhang von Spiel und Differenz in den Briefen ‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen’,” in: Bürger, Jan (ed.), Friedrich Schiller: Dichter, Denker, Vor- und Gegenbild, Göttingen: Wallstein-Verl. 2007, pp. 158-171.) Until this day, a widespread connotation of the German word ‘Spiel,’ which has this aimless ‘here and there’ at its core, has to do with a mostly unintentional freedom of movement within and among machine parts: ‘The steering has too much play (“Spiel”).’ This is just how Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman define human play: “Play is free movement within a more rigid structure.” (Salen/Zimmerman: Rules of Play, loc. 4730) The fact that the most important audiovisual modern media have the same German language ‘last name’ of ‘Spiel’, which has its roots in free motion, points to what binds these media together irrespective of their great variety: the principle of aesthetic play. According to Friedrich Schlegel, aesthetic play also possesses narratological and mimetic features, within which the “appearance of acts” (“Schein von Handlungen”) is generated through artistic means (Athäneums Fragments, in: Schlegel, Friedrich von/Behler, Ernst/Anstett, Jean Jacques/Eichner, Hans: Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe: Erste Abteilung: Kritische Neuausgabe, vol. 2, Munich; Paderborn; Wien: F. Schöningh 1967, p. 180).—This definition has bestowed validity upon many later attempts—from Johan Huizinga up until contemporary game theorists like Jesse Schell—through the advantage of an openness which transcends the boundaries of the arts (and media). While this definition generally covers the similarities of the stage play (Bühnenspiel) and the digital game (digitales Spiel), it inevitably avoids their differences. For the close relationships among audiovisual media say little about the quality of those actual relationships. Cain slew Abel and everyone would like to find their own familial example of the dialectic of attraction and repulsion, of alternating states of cooperation, coexistence, and constant strife. In particular, the various—aesthetic, artistic, practical, technological, economic—aspects of the cultural relationships between game and film demand a more precise, historical clarification. See Intermezzo: Game//Film, p. hereff.

2 Alberti, Leon Battista: On Painting. Translated with Introduction and Notes by John R. Spencer, New Haven: Yale University Press 1970, *1956, Chapter 19; http://www.noteaccess.com/Texts/Alberti/

3 Crawford, Chris: “The Phylogeny of Play,” (2010); http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/science/the-phylogeny-of-play.html

4 Herodotus/Macaulay, G. C.: The History of Herodotus, 2 vols., London; New York: Macmillan and Co. 1890, here Book 1, Clio, 94; http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hh/index.htm

5 McGonigal: Reality Is Broken, loc. 242.

6 Mäyrä: An Introduction to Game Studies, loc. 621.

7 Juul: Half-Real, loc. 272.

8 Pross, Harry: Medienforschung: Film, Funk, Presse, Fernsehen, Darmstadt: Habel 1972.

9 Pross: Medienforschung, p. 119.

10 Ibid., p. 68.

11 Ibid., p. 78.

12 Ibid.

13 Huizinga, Johan: Homo Ludens, loc. 129.

14 Pross: Medienforschung, p. 69.

15 Goldblatt, David: The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football, New York: Riverhead Books (Kindle edition) 2008, loc. 217. The subsequent outline of the history of soccer follows Goldblatt’s narrative.

16 Ibid., loc. 239.—An important exception is displayed by American culture. Within American culture, FOOTBALL established itself as a combination of SOCCER and RUGBY. Characteristic of the sport is the oval shape of the ball as well as the case that, at certain times, players may use both hands and feet to interact with the ball, and, finally, an entirely different game experience for both player and spectator: “Perhaps most fundamentally of all, soccer offers modes of storytelling and narrative structures that the American sporting public finds unsatisfactory.” (Ibid., loc. 133)

17 Ibid., loc. 182.

18 See ibid., loc. 269.

19 Ibid., loc. 422.

20 Ibid., loc. 490.

21 Ibid., loc. 492.

22 Ibid., loc. 516.

23 Ibid., loc. 1119.

24 Ibid., loc. 818.

25 Ibid., loc. 822-824.

26 Ibid., loc. 809.

27 Ibid., loc. 1394.

28 Ibid., loc. 1436.

29 Ibid., loc. 1344.

30 Ibid., loc. 1442.

31 Ibid., loc. 1355.

32 Grieves, Kevin: “On This Day in History: First Live Radio Broadcast of a Soccer Match, 1927,” The Modern Historian, January 23, 2009; http://modernhistorian.blogspot.de/2009/01/on-this-day-in-history-first-live-radio.html

33 N. N.: “Happened on This Day—16 September,” news.BBC, September 16, 2002; http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/funny_old_game/2260280.stm

34 N. N.: “Crown Soccer Special,” The International Arcade Museum at Museum of the Game o.J.; http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=16047

35 N. N.: “EA Sports FIFA Soccer Franchise Sales Top 100 Million Units Lifetime,” Business Wire, November 4, 2010; http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101104006782/en - .VH8zdIs2JVo

36 A good example of the Industrial path from activity to passivity can be seen in the radio, which was originally developed as a medium with two-way channels (radio, after all, means a device that sends and receives radio signals) and only mutated after the First World War in the process of its popularization into a receiver. On the evolution of the broadcast medium radio from the amateur radio movement, see Campbell-Kelly, Martin/Aspray, William: Computer: A History of the Information Machine, New York: Basic Books 1996, p. 234 ff.

37 The digital as a quaternary medium has already been addressed by Fassler, Manfred: Was ist Kommunikation?, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 1997, p. 117.

38 The following game engines have been and continue to be of particular importance for the history of games: the Unreal Engine (Epic Games, since 1998), the CryEngine (Crytek, since 2004) and the Unity Engine (Unity, since 2005).

39 See for example: Friedberg, Anne: Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Berkeley: University of California Press 1993.

40 See for the term Knowledge Worker: Drucker, Peter F.: Post-Capitalist Society, New York NY: HarperBusiness 1993. And to the term Symbolic Analyst: Reich, Robert B.: The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-century Capitalism, New York: A.A. Knopf 1991.

41 Pross: Medienforschung, p. 104.

42 Turkle, Sherry: Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York: Simon & Schuster 1995, p. 22.