Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

A key feature of convergence of media and information technologies is their ability to provide enhanced user control features that potentially provide a wider range of domestication possibilities. Although popular representations of personalised media (such as 'The Daily Me' electronic newspaper) typically portray user control in basic terms, such as filtering based on user-defined media topics, recent experience with convergence media indicates that users have additional expectations. For example, users expect to control their media consumption through not only filtering, but also time-shifting, archiving, and reformulating content, as well as resisting control limitations such as those imposed by digital rights management systems and aggressive advertising. There is a considerable tension between user domestication and producer design imperatives in terms of user control in convergence media.

As new media, computer games are commonly characterised by interactivity and the levels of immersion they afford their players. In contrast to player-to-player games in which both players can take action in real time without fixed turns, the closed ecosystems of action- adventure console games tend to articulate player-to-game interactivity. Within the context of a longitudinal study into the nature of players' relationships with action-adventure games, a contradiction between design-intent and player-treatment was observed that constituted a natural component of a game's life-cycle. Video footage taken within the social contexts in which play is actualised revealed instances in which participants transformed one-player games into an effective and highly structured social hybrid of game-play. A single case study is provided of a natural occurrence of collaborative play with the console version of the game Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain (Eidos).

This essay examines the use of high-tech imagery in cinema with regard to how cinema introduces digital technologies into the visual and narrative styles of film. Science fiction films in particular take advantage of new technologies and create new special effects that are incorporated into dystopian views on the relationship between man/woman and machine that fuses to create hybrid characters. The merger of cinema and computer, with its expanded representation of motion and space comparable to virtual reality settings, together with the characterisation of machines as evil, characterise the two dominant strategies of cinema's response to new media. In a discussion of two films which at the time of their respective releases highlighted this double approach - Terminator 2 and The Matrix - I suggest that the struggle about space in both films transgresses the generic tradition of science fiction and responds to general disturbances in the temporal- spatial order in electronic culture. However, where the earlier Terminator 2 offers discourse, the later The Matrix turns entropic and regressive.