Tactical Engagement through Gaming and Narrowcasting

Lev Manovich explains that interaction is an obvious function of the computer that should not be confused with precomputer audience interaction in the form of reading audiovisual information and interpreting meaning.1 Digital media, then, functions within closed systems, not outside them. This chapter examines two types of interaction that are potentially not overdetermined by corporate and state surveillance of data gathering. Here, interaction functions as critical or tactial engagement. We analyze digital media that forwards the ideals of tactical media that Rita Raley has described that engage in strategic micropolitics rather than grand revolutions.2 We examine digital media projects that include counter-gaming, machinima (3D animation shot in a game engine), video performances, and documentaries that appeal to affective and subjective forms of knowledge and reject assumptions that objectivity and evidence are the only valid forms. Identities are not fixed but performed, that is, contingent upon politics rather than place. We also probe narrowcasting, which reconfigures the push of broadcasting on commercial networks in the direction of P2P models, somewhat like the “spreadability” described by Henry Jenkins.3 Given restrictions on both print and online access to journal articles, Katherine Hayles argues that academic work largely has “a negligible audience and a nugatory communicative function.”4