Navigability as a fundamental form of new media

Lev Manovich argues that the key feature of computer space is its navigability; his argument point towards the computer game as an example of “navigable space”. In comparison between Doom and Myst, the player in Doom moves in straight lines, “abruptly turning at right angles to enter a new corridor”[1], the navigational structure in Myst is much more open and liberated. “The player, or more precisely, the visitor, slowly explores the environment: she may look around for a while, go in circles, return to the same place over and over, as thought performing an elaborate dance”[2]. And yet the two games are basically identical since they are both “spatial journeys”. Manovich claim that these games were designed for players to wander around inside, it’s indeed a world. The players gain great control over movement, space and time in the three dimensional virtual space. “Rather than being narrated to, the player herself has to perform actions to move narrative forward…If the player does nothing, the narrative stops. From this perspective, movement through the game world is one of the main narrative actions. But this movement also serves the self-sufficient goal of exploration.”[3] This sense of autonomous in the game world also applies to other motion simulator such as information visualizer, which allows the user to travel around the network database. Apart from navigable space’s autonomous; Manovich also argues that “navigable space is not just a purely functional interface. It is also an expression and gratification of a psychological desire, a state of being, a subject position---or rather, a subject’s trajectory. If the subject of modern society looked for refuge from the chaos of the real world in the stability and balance of the static composition…finds peace in the knowledge that she can slide over endless helds of data, locating any morsel of information with the click of button, zooming through file system and network. She is comforted not by an equilibrium of shapes and colors, but by the variety of data manipulation operations at her control.”[4]

Navigability allows one to explore, to create his or her own world and path. Manovich educed an example from Legible City, in which landmark presents a symbolic rather than illusionist space. “The memory of the real city is carefully preserved without succumbing to illusionism; the virtual representation encodes the city’s genetic code, its deep structure rather than its surface.”[5] This idea of mapping through memory links to Frederic Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping: a process composed of a series of psychological transformations by which an individual acquires, codes, stores, recalls, and decodes information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday spatial environment. The key attribution of cognitive mapping is its individuality. Given a common exterior environment, each observer organizes and creates his or her unique “map” in the head that is different from the others. Thus, the individual’s spatial behavior relies upon this cognitive map of the surrounding environment. Real world mapping may or may not be relevant in creating virtual landscapes, but it is used to envision cyber world, games and virtual environments, which in turn are reflections of individual’s awareness of the real world. A navigable virtual space creates this possibility for user to “map out” his or her own understanding of the social environment and its relationship to his or her existence.

When technology provides a computer-generated virtual reality that is an alternative to physical reality through navigability and 3-D graphic design, it allows virtual reality to interact with the hyperreality. Jean Baudrillard refers this hyperreality as a simulacrum of the real world. Computer space thus becomes the medium of the simulacrum in which it blurs the line between the “real” and the “virtual” and make it appear “natural.” “It is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.”[6] The user’s experience in the virtual world is of a simulation of reality rather than reality itself. Video game player temporarily forgets the difference between the game world and the physical world.

Apply Fredric Jameson’s notion to Manovich’s argument of navigable space, designing a virtual world through which subjects can navigate and orientate themselves successfully requires an understanding of cognitive map formation in virtual environments. And this formation of virtual reality is what Jean Baudrillard refers to as a simulacrum: the map, the symbol, the real and the virtual that forms the basis that all the information is a simulation of real space, it is a self-reflexive work of the real world.

[1]Manovich, “Navigable Space” The Language of New Media (Cambridge,
MA: MIT, 2000)

[2]Manovich, “Navigable Space” The Language of New Media (Cambridge,
MA: MIT, 2000)

[3] Manovich, “Navigable Space” The Language of New Media (Cambridge,
MA: MIT, 2000)

[4] Manovich, “Navigable Space” The Language of New Media (Cambridge,
MA: MIT, 2000)

[5] Manovich, “Navigable Space” The Language of New Media (Cambridge,
MA: MIT, 2000)

[6] Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of the Simulacra,” Simulation and
Simulacra. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan, 1994)