Watch this Video!

DS Games - E3 2010 - Guitar Hero 5

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So John and I watched this video for a course we're taking in video games and critical theory, but I feel as though it is also particularly germane to our discussion of the brand as new media object. Specifically, I'm interested in the video's discussion of the game-ification of culture and how a system of surveillance, competition, and incentivization can be exploited by corporations under the benevolent auspices of "play." Throughout, it's also very interesting to see the speaker, Jesse Schell, tread that very fine line between utopian and dystopian rhetoric...

However, before I get into the video, I think it would definitely be useful to talk a little bit about my reaction to Celia Lurie’s essay so that I might better appropriate its concepts in a clear and specific way. First off, let me just say that while I definitely feel as though Lurie’s claims to the metaphorical equivalence of brands and new media sometimes seem like a bit of a stretch, I do think that the large majority of her points have validity. In line with Canclini, I appreciate the fact that she imagines the brand as an interface between producers and consumers, a dynamic “image instrument” for facilitating a communicative feedback loop between the two parties. Brands really do have a profit incentive to be malleable and heterogeneous in response to the varied and constantly updating demands of consumers. At the same time, I’m also glad that she recognizes that the way the brand works as an information management tool in mediating the dynamic relationships between producers and consumers doesn’t operate under some pure “interactivity,” but under an “asymmetrical” distribution of power.

However, my main point of contention with Lurie’s article is that she seems to imply that because the brand deals in the language of “personality,” “image,” “value,” and “qualitative” judgment, its operation as an object is somehow not rational (I don’t think she is quite saying that it is irrational). On the contrary, I feel that if we just slightly tweak the framing of her key insights, the “totalizing” (but not “total”) impulses of the brand’s “dynamic unity” can be seen as a form of hyperrationality. True, as Eva Illouz told us last week, the mode of address to the consumer must take into account the idea of emotion, but isn’t the whole point of market research to try and figure out how to statistically pinpoint and utilize various emotions as tools in the generation of profit? (Illouz’s notion of emotion as more precise and differentiated than the notion of “desire” might have a relationship to the concept of modality here…) And as Naomi Klein has told us this week (and Baudrillard has told us previously), brands are in the business of signs, culture, and lifestyles rather than just products, but in order to better target their desired demographics, entire armies of marketing researchers and psychologists must do their best to engineer a brand image which simultaneously differentiates itself from other brands within the market, while also establishing a continuity for the brand to which various products can be seen to recognizably belong.

It is within this “logos” of hyperrationalization and the expansion of the brand that I now turn to the video. Although I think that the speaker makes some outlandish claims and sort of makes the opposite value-judgment from the one that I would make, I do think that he is useful in projecting many of the relationships between technology and branding that I think may constitute our near future. In line with what Henry Jenkins calls the “black box fallacy,” Schell recognizes that technological convergence does not necessarily mean the creation of digital swiss army knives, but instead will entail the proliferation and expansion of diverse technologies into ambient space, subsumed under the dynamic unity of the brand. (Although he doesn't choose to call this process "convergence" and retains none of the nuances of Jenkins' use of the term, I would argue that Schell's vision of the proliferation and expansion of technologies at least doesn't fall into the naive reductionism of the black box fallacy). In Schell's vision, user-feedback loops will not just be conducted via consumer surveys and market research but will be incentivized via ubiquitous gaming which melds the brand and aesthetic object so well that we no longer have mere brand sponsorship but complete brand-content integration. Here, those age-old, neoliberal signifiers of freedom, choice, and empowerment get pushed to the next level in the rhetoric of interactivity, which seem to allow consumers to, as Baudrillard so eloquently said, “make the choice imposed on them.”

At this point in Schell's talk, I also couldn't help but think of how surveillance allows g-mail to read your e-mails and profile you in order to generate advertisements customized to your needs. Here, there is a relation between digitization, what Lisa Nakamura calls “menu-driven identities,” and market research that I find particularly troubling. And, as Schell seems to imply, if we can only co-opt ubiquitous sensoring to more "noble" purposes, maybe we can craft better citizens, progressive societies, and, perhaps even most importantly, more efficient and expansive economies. Somewhere, Foucault is turning in his grave...

Sorry for the overly dramatic rant on the dystopian future, but needless to say, this video sort of struck a chord with me. While I do agree that digital technologies offer particular affordances for decentralization and grassroots empowerment, I do think that they also can be implemented in the branding sense for a more efficient methodology of control. I personally think we need to pay more attention to the discourse of the latter if we don’t want to trump the potentially liberating possibilities of the former.

P.S. for Charlie: Watch out for his discussion near the beginning of Wii Games and Facebook applications as more "authentic" or "realistic" gameplay in distinction to more traditional, fantasy oriented games. Third order simulacra anyone?