HyperBewildered

This text relates my total failure as a player of House Abandon[1](Jon McKellan, 2017) with the notion of hypermediacy ( Bolter & Grusin 1999)[2]. This experience which took place within the New Media & Society seminar of my current studies Spiel && Objekt[3]. There I sat staring sheepish at the screen, trying to play a computer game inside a computer game inside a classroom with about a dozen other fellow students who were all better at it than myself. I heard the suspenseful noises from haunted house around the room and excited chatting, trying to eavesdrop the solution to my current problem, namely find the generator to get the lights on in the living room. Issue is, my eavesdropping was not all that successful for two reasons: firstly, because everyone seemed to be already exploring the second floor; and secondly, because I was the only non-native german speaker in the room, though I do speak it and enjoy learning it in everyday life and have improved a bit since. House Abandon is a crystal-clear example of the intensified operation of entangling and different media with each other: a 2017 computer game themed after 80´s tech which combines text adventure and puzzle-solving, riddles which suck the player deeper into the layers of the horror story, narrated through a first person camera with various levels of meta-fiction and reality mirroring. Means condensed, interwoven, pointing to themselves and to other means. My PC is referred to by the fictional Futuro 128k + 2, I as player-character play a protagonist who plays a player of his own past, seeking to connect the fragmented and grimm episodes which somehow constellate into the narration slumbering in the haunted house, once the idealized image of childhood. My unsuccessfulness as a player of the game made uninterrupted concentration difficult, exposing the complexity of the hypermediatic network, because I always bumped into a the opacity of the game. I have very little experience as a text-adventure player and consume seldom horror or suspenseful narratives. Hypermediacy is not only defined by the overlapping of media itself, for each medium contains its own index, its own reference list. Hypermediacy demands from the player a hyperliteracy. Idd to that the complexity of the analogue room in which I sat, same game multiplied and fast-forwarded. Still to that I can add my german illiteracy in comparison to the medium. In Remediation (17), Bolter & Grusin quote Erkki Huhntamo[4](1995):

Technology is gradually becoming a second nature, a territory both external and internalized, and an object of desire. There is no need to make it transparent any longer, simply because it is not felt to be in contradiction of the ´authenticity´ of the experience.

The webbing of the digital and the analogue, of matrixed timelines, of game and narration, of swarm collectivity, molecules and bytes. One hour of a computer game seminar can be oh so complex. I am glad that the hypermedial resists thorough human comprehension. Wilderness allows for wonder.

TomasM