Musings about Ready Player One

Ready Player One is a recent novel by Ernest Cline. It’s about a contest to find an easter egg in OASIS, the novel’s uber MMO that has absorbed all MMOs, games, shopping, Internet et cetera. Right before dying, the bachelor, shut-in, and stuck in his childhood in the 80s creator of OASIS created a huge easter egg, and made a contest of solving the easter egg. Whoever won got his fortune, which was the largest in the world by far. It takes the world some 7 years to solve it, and the book is about the solving. It gets almost all of its allure, unabashedly, from 80s pop culture (although this extends to 70s and 90s in parts), and the plot itself is basically about how the crazy megabillionaire’s own nostalgia for his past has affected the rest of the world in their search for the easter egg that will grant them his megabillions. So, that’s the plot, but what’s interesting is the nostalgia.

I use the term ‘nostalgia’ here rather loosely though as it isn’t exactly nostalgia. Or rather, it isn’t nostalgia for everybody. For the author it probably is nostalgia, for the reader it might be, for the diegetic creator of the game it was, but for the players it was entirely second hand. As egg hunters (“gunters”) they’re obsessed with 80s pop culture as it is assumed to be (and in fact is) the key to solving the easter egg. It was never their culture, and this is doubly sad as their own culture, as the book is so quick in its distopia to point out, is dead and escaping in virtual worlds that comprise OASIS. The real world sucks, so they get out, but the virtual worlds (at least the ones visited in the book) are completely filled with 80s nostalgia. They’ve lost their past and present and instead live in somebody else’s past. It’s a bit trippy in some ways. It makes me wonder about whose nostalgia it is now. By ‘now’ I mean now now, outside in the real world where remakes and demakes and minecraft and the SC2 lost viking minigame splash screen are all present.

The other thing I can’t help but think about is the large number of environmentally distopian novels I’ve read recently. While Wendy Chun has written about sci-fi as the never coming future I wonder if that holds with the more scientifically frightening science fiction like Oryx and Crake and Ready Player One that are really all based on the belief that we’re screwed because of a built up fucking over of the planet.

Playing In/With the Archive

Archives are everywhere. This much is obvious. Essays and books with archive somewhere in the theme or title have increased in the past few decades and recently I have seen a slew of ‘archive’ related conference CPFs.

Of interest to me is the archive’s intersection with gaming, history and memory. There are three points of intersection that I see: acknowledgment and creation of archives, manipulation of archives and playing in archives. These three forms of archival play correspond to three types of games and gaming. One, massive ROMization (MAME, SNES9X, et cetera) and recent (official) migration of old games to WiiWare, Xbox Live Arcade and Play Station Network. Two, sequels and remakes of older games and the creation of a particular genealogy of titles. Three, demakes and unofficial titles that problematize the greater archive.

The first is simply the building of an archive of obsolete platforms and games. Whereas it used to be possible to pull out one’s old NES and blow into the cartridge more people are finding that the technology simply doesn’t work anymore. This goes doubly for games that were/are hard to find. As the technology has become increasingly unavailable it has become obvious to more and more people that an archive/library is necessary for games. However, because the platforms themselves become similarly unavailable it has also been necessary to create a means of playing the games.

Since the late 1990s there have been semi-legal efforts to play ROMs on personal computers. The game’s cartridge information is ripped to a computer and emulators are programmed to play the games. While emulators are made for some of the most advanced systems such emulation has generally been problematic (buggy, slow, unable to play many games), the emulation of older systems like arcades, Atari, NES, SNES, SEGA et cetera have been highly successful. While this method has resulted in a massive archiving of games (even if the platforms and materiality of play have disappeared – television, cartridge, console, controller), one thing that is undeniable is that this ROMization is less than fully legal and companies are losing what they see as a profit.

The second generation of the archive has recently been implemented with the big three game companies (Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft) creating respective means to play previous generational games. Nintendo releases WiiWare versions of previous games such as Megaman that one can play on the Nintendo Wii. Sony releases past games such as Spyro the Dragon through the Playstation Network (it should also be noted that the Playstation, as a DVD/CD console is able to play older generational games (the PS3 can play PS2 and PS1 games; the PS2 can play PS1 games). Finally, Xbox Live Arcade, which has more broadly made available Sega and other games. While all three of these forms have been more legal than the ROM movement in that they prevent ‘piracy’ they are far from successful in the simple archiving project. They pick and choose (and buy the rights for) what they archive on the three libraries.

However, both of these projects are at base simply the creation of an archive for preservation and further use of games. Here I refer to the building and playing of the archive.

The second way in which the archive and gaming interact is something that has been going on since Tennis for Two, but has begun to take a slightly more aggressive turn. While gaming has always been a form of remediation, and sequels have been around (at least) since PacMan turned into Ms. PacMan, there have more recently been remakes cropping up that are slightly different. Previously I discussed the interaction with a form of restorative nostalgia with the remake. The remake, as restorative, acts to whitewash the past and justify a particular reading of history: it is a form of playing with the archive. This is not new or unusual: all history is manipulative and restorative. However, initial implementation that occurs simultaneously with the rise of the second generation of company archiving is interesting. It makes one think of just what is happening when FPS and 3rd person action games are being remade: what happens to the archive when its contents are embellished and highlighted?

Third is the demake and what I want to call playing in the archive. It is also a type of playing in the past. Demakes work with reflective nostalgia and focus on the patina of the old. With games this is crucially ideas like retro graphics seen with the initial MAME movement, but it is also the attempts to translate/adapt modern games to older platforms. That most of these demakes can only be played by emulation is slightly problematic, but one might also point out the longer history of cartridge manipulation (Cory Arcangel’s Mario Clouds) and its progress into the present with efforts being made to put demakes onto cartridges (D+Pad Hero). Here people are deliberately moving into the archive, taking present things and forcing them into the older sections of the archive. Unhappy with the look and smell of a new book it’s given a fake patina and odorized in order pass and pleasure like an old book.

So, these three types of gamic archiving are taking place. We know that the archive is a deliberate (if uncontrollable) cementation of knowledge and indication of a certain mode of knowledge production. So, the question is really what sort of knowledge production is happening with these three types of gaming archives? What is the difference between the first and second generations of archiving? What sort of knowledge is opened up and closed by remaking and demaking?

Remakes and Demakes: Logics of Repetition in Gaming



Remakes and Demakes: Logics of Repetition in Gaming

Written: March 21, 2009



Tomb Raider is a 3rd person action adventure game. The player controls the now famous character Lara Croft as she explores various environments (Peru, Greece, Egypt and Atlantis) searching for the keys to unlock and eventually explore the lost city of Atlantis. The Anniversary remake uses the same 3rd person genre, narrative and particular locales as the original. The graphics are updated from clunky, early polygonal representation to high-count polygon graphics that produce a more “naturalistic” or “realistic” representation. [1]  The remake could be considered a “faithful” translation of the original as it reproduces the flow and specific scenes/levels of the original, but it works to erase the dated aspect: the graphics. [2]  By this logic the important, reproduced aspects are the play style and the property itself.

The Anniversary remake, as a highly commercial endeavor, reproduces the “good” elements of the original for simple economic reasons. It brings back what the audience has paid for time and again with extras. The generic mode of 3rd person 3D action/adventure genre, itself an update to 2D platformers such as Super Mario Bros., was popularized in the original Tomb Raider. It has been revived as a genre in each Tomb Raider sequel, and the Anniversary remake flogs the tired generic horse enough to make a (significant) profit. The economic logics of “better-faster-more” are of central importance to the remake. Perhaps the only remakes that do not follow the threefold increase are those that attempt to take the game as is visually and transfer the game from a previous, now increasingly difficult to obtain, or simply obsolete, platform to a modern one. Examples of this are the Square-Enix Final Fantasy games that are being remade from the 1990s Super Nintendo hardware to the 2000s Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS hardware. In these remakes additional elements (“more”) are added, but the other two aspects remain as they were in the original (faithfully reproduced graphics and speed).

The remake is thus involved in a process of renewal where “old” is turned into “new” in a strictly linear fashion that posits less < more, slow < fast, abstract < naturalistic, and so forth. This techno-economic logic of “better-faster-more” dominates gaming on the top commercial layer, but it is directly opposed within the discourse surrounding the demake.

Demaking is a recent phenomenon where a game is translated in the opposite direction compared to the standard remaking. The term “de-make” was coined by Phil Fish on the TIGForums in August of 2007. In response to recent remakes, Fish writes:


Instead of taking an old game and making it new the demake takes a new game and makes it old either through genre or graphics. Fish uses the term “downgrade” in opposition to the normative “upgrade” assumed with the remake’s advancement along the previous mentioned techno-economic logic of “better-faster-more,” and then asks if anybody can think of another name: a year and a half later the hyphen has been removed and numerous other demakes have been made both independently by interested parties and within The Independent Gaming Source’s Bootleg Demakes Competition.

The demake that I will primarily be considering here, D+Pad Hero, was created by Kent Hansen and Andreas Pederson and is a demake of Guitar Hero a popular music simulation game. Guitar Hero is one of many music simulation games (others include Rock Band, SingStar, GuitarFreaks and DrumMania) where the user “plays” an instrument (drumset, guitar) or sings in rhythm to music and beats displayed on the screen. With Guitar Hero the guitar is unplayable as a guitar and simply consists of five input buttons and a “strum” bar that the player uses in order to “play” the song. The player must press the buttons and use the strum bar in accordance with the cues on the screen, which are in tune/rhythm with the song being played, and a score is given at the end of the song based on accuracy. This logic has been in older games such as BeatMania (1997), Pop’n Music (1998) and Dance, Dance Revolution (1998), but has increasingly been combined with simulated musical production and commercial music. While Pop’n Music forced the player to press five large, colored buttons arranged on an arcade frame in accordance to the cues and a son, the later games put the buttons on a faux instrument. The original Guitar Hero and the other music simulation games have had dozens of expansions and sequels. is in its third release and the other games are around a similar sequel number. The sequels follow a similar techno-economic logic as the remake in that they have more realistic controllers (‘guitars’ where you strum while holding the proper buttons down) and more popular music (Beatles, Metallica, et cetera); the expansions simply have more songs.


The second logic is of representation/simulation. The idea of naturalistic graphics or perceptual realism is related to the concept of “better-faster-more” within the techno-economic logic, but it extends beyond the simple technological fetish for photorealistic graphics. Both the remake and the demake are crucially related to re-presentation and the link (or lack thereof) between production and reproduction, image and meaning, and/or original and derivative. The conflict between true meaning, lack of meaning and drawn meaning are in conflict within the original, remake and demake. One line of thinking extends from the Marxist desire to raise the veil of ideology and thereby reveal truth through Althusser and the inability to ever escape ideology to Baudrillard, the hyperreal, simulation and an inability to every return to any ultimate truth. True meaning ends within the concept of simulation, but the path can also be linked with a separate path that goes through semiotics and Barthes’ differentiation of the work and the text, Foucault’s destabilization of the author, and Manovich’s concept of transcoding from a base. These two lines then culminate in Jenkins and the postmodern celebration of fan culture and the user’s ability to make his or her own meaning. Meaningless pluralism is reached through this path. [5]



Techno-Economic Logic

The initial logic within the remake is one of technology and economics. The remake is made in a particular way because it sells and the particular way in which it is made reproduces the dominant trend of technological advancement. [6] Since the 1950s computers have grown exponentially more powerful. The course has generally followed Moore’s law, which posits that the speed of a processor doubles roughly every two years. While historically the technology indeed followed this logic in that things double in speed every two years, whether this is a natural development or a self-developing prophecy due to the industry’s desire to maintain the trend is unknowable. Similarly problematic is the chicken and egg effect of the hardware being forced into obsolescence due to Moore’s Law and the public’s desire for faster computers. However, the result is that computers either needed to, or simply could run more complex applications.






Representation/Simulational Logic



DN Rodowick notes representation is often “defined as spatial correspondence” (Rodowick 2007, 102), but I would add that the concept of temporal correspondence (present, presence) is just as important, if slightly more obviously impossible to achieve. Rodowick himself protests the image’s (analog and digital) link to both representation and perceptual realism claiming that photography does not provide spatial semblance, but in fact corresponds to “our perceptual and cognitive norms for apprehending a represented space” (Rodowick 2007, 103). Thus, that which is re-presented is not a physical reality, but a mental and psychological one obtained through perception (Rodowick 2007, 105). Obviously, this argument holds that representation is not reality, but that does not answer what it is, nor does it answer why it is both produced and consumed. One way of getting at the questions of ‘what’ and ‘why’ is primarily through Marxist analysis, and the other is through psychoanalysis, but both include a dosage of semiotics.

Following Marx’s conceptualization of the proletariat’s existence within the capitalist mode of production as false consciousness, the Frankfurt school theorists extend from the economic base to also include superstructural false consciousness. Horkheimer and Adorno write, “Capitalist production so confines [the workers and employees, the farmers and the lower class], body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them… the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, 133-4). The captivating myth in question is the culture industry’s representation of everyday life.




Writing at approximately the same time and intertwined with Lefebvre, Louis Althusser’s work is on ideology as an always-already constituted element where there ceases to be access to some untouched origin: the veil might be raised, but nothing but another veil will be seen; you might be outside of an ideology, but never ideology (Althusser 1986). Althusser’s work seeks to answer the question of just why the proletariat revolution never happened by bringing out Gramscian notions of hegemony and formulating a dual imposition of Repressive State Apparatuses and Ideological State Apparatuses. While ultimately side-stepping the ire of the orthodox Marxists by giving more importance to RSAs and the economic base in the last instance, Althusser’s analysis in fact identifies the superstructural process of interpellation through which the person is made one with the society so that he or she does not in fact want to rebel. He argues that turning around to a police officer’s hailing shows a person’s interpellation within an ideological system; another example would be identifying (or seeking to identify with) an advertisement. Even if one rejects the hailing of one particular ideology one cannot escape: such a rejection indicates a separate subjective ideology, but not the existence of being outside ideology, and even then one can still intersubjectively imagine a subject that would be interpellated and thereby still be within the system. The second part of Althusser’s theory holds that because one’s identity is formed within an all-inclusive ideology one can never get back to some untouched, uninfluenced origin. We are always-already within ideology and we are always-already constituted as particular subjects. Because of the formulation of always-already there is in fact no false-consciousness from which we can escape, as it is all we have and all we can ever have.

Althusser’s crucial break from the hopes of denaturalization was enabled in part by Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic work on reality, language and the three orders: imaginary, symbolic and real. The real is impossible to interact with/see/witness as it resides outside of language; any attempts to get back to a real (through representation) are necessarily fractured through the very structure of language. Language then is part of the symbolic order as it structures and stands between the real and the imaginary (experienced) world. Finally, Lacan’s third order, the imaginary, is the world that we inhabit, our subjective experiences. Althusser’s always-already corresponds to Lacan’s imaginary: it is the represented world. Thus, the problem posed by Althusser is not of getting back to the origin, but understanding and problematizing the (grammatical and material) means and conditions of production of desire, the imaginary, ideological world. He has taken away the Marxist out (the veil), but he has left the possibility of understanding the world.



Taking a step beyond Lefebvre, Baudrillard takes the possibility of return, of an out from a life in a produced world, away. The territory does not survive the map because the hyperreal/simulation “threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ (Baudrillard 1994, 3). Baudrillard identifies a very particular moment when wars were being enacted in front of cameras, re-presented to the world, and being reacted to as ‘real’ events: his argument thus states that there is no difference between real and fake events. [10] The representation “has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard 1994, 6), which leads to deterrence and simply dealing with the hyperreal as the only reality around. Baudrillard takes Lacan’s imaginary order and runs with it as the only reality to which we have access. While Baudrillard was far from celebratory of the hyperreal world, a few years later Zizek tells us to love our symptom. We have no recourse to the real to denaturalize, so we might as well do the best we can. Unfortunately, this logic combines in an uncomfortable way with the destabilization of meaning within postmodern semiotic theory.

Linked in some ways to his work on meaning in photography, Barthes’ differentiation between a work and a text is important as it points to the point of meaning making and what it means for the text itself (Barthes 2007). The work is singular, has a proper meaning that “closes upon a signified,” has “filiations” to field and author, and is ultimately an “object of consumption.” In contrast, the text “is experienced only as an activity in production,” resists classification as a “paradoxical” thing, is “radically symbolic,” plural and understood within a network and not linked to a father/author. Michel Foucault further questions the text’s link to an authorial function and claims that it is imperative to reverse the author function in order to change the discourse of research from subject based to discourse based knowledge (Foucault 2003, 390-1). Opposed to the modern work, the text is ultimately a postmodern, intertextual production. Both of these claims are important, but become problematic when eventually linked up to the remake.

Lev Manovich does not explicitly bring up the concept of a work or text in his discussion of new media, but his five aspects of new media resemble Barthes’ tropes of a text. Manovich claims that there are five relevant principles within new media: numerical representation (digitization), modularity (workable chunks of data), automation (high and low forms of computer automation), variability (which is linked to modularity and postfordism as well as translation through the concept of the “base object”), and transcoding/programmability. The principles obviously move from old to new media in the same way that Barthes moves from work to text, but the ideas of variability and transcoding hold further interest. Manovich’s concept of variability implies a sort of base object that can be altered into varied new forms. However, unlike translation where there is an original and a translation, a first and a second, the singular base object exists as an incomplete entity and therefore does not actually exist in a power relationship to the varied finished objects. Similarly, “to ‘transcode’ something is to translate it into another format” (Manovich 2001, 47). Manovich’s language of new media renders horizontal the last shred of authorial/original meaning and continues with Barthes and Foucault’s intertextualization of the text so that by the time we get to the original, remake and demake they are all simply transcodings of some other base object of simulation.

It is at this point that I can relate the Representational Logic to the remake and demake. The remake follows the simulational logic that stems from Baudrillard’s discussion of hypersimulation (Baudrillard 1994, 19-20). The remake seeks greater perceptual realism so that one cannot tell the difference between a game and life and in fact doesn’t matter. The simulated bank robbery becomes/is a real bank robbery; the person pushing the button to drop the bomb is the same whether he or she knows or not. In contrast, the demake D+Pad Hero problematizes the simulational logic by moving from the simulated experience of playing a (fake) guitar to simply inputting the buttons on a controller. There is no difference within the coded level of the game itself, but the personal experience is completely different. The progression of music simulation games has increasingly tried to reproduce the experience of playing an instrument. While the movement of buttons to a fake guitar is still far from “real,” the movement of buttons to fake drums is slightly less problematic as the action of drumming is within the fake drumming. In contrast, D+Pad Hero removes the instrument and brings back the four direction game pad from deep in the gamer’s memory. Similarly, the return to 8bit music from an era of CD quality reproduction in the original Guitar Hero disrupts the standard representational experience by forcing the player to return recognize that he or she is gaming and not actually playing music with an instrument.


Historico-Nostalgic Logic




The restorative tendency aims toward a unified truth generally understood as the national project. It “manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past” (Boym 2001, 41). Restorative nostalgia can be seen in the active use of the past to form a particular history. As said before, Tomb Raider: Anniversary reconstructs the entirety of Tomb Raider and what it leaves out is in fact excised from history: the reconstruction becomes history, not the past/original itself. As Constantin Fasolt writes against the historians’ rule against mixing the past as immutable and present as occurring:





Travelling in Place


In his reconsideration of theory travelling between contexts, Edward Said wrote that “The point of theory… is to travel, always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in a sense in exile” (Said 2007, 252). While Said writes of the affiliation to Lukàcs beyond mere borrowing or adaptation, he also writes that conflating Viennese twelve-tone music of Adorno with the Algerian resistance and French colonialism of Fanon would be grotesque. Similarly, the demake and remake must be understood as tangled with repetition, but not as inextricably tied, which is something that is impossible through simply following concepts such as simulation, remediation and transcoding. Change is a type of production of knowledge and knowledge is never innocent. As technological, representational and historical modes of knowledge production the remake and demake are neither objective nor innocent and must be understood as such.


[1]  Such realisticness is of course separate from concepts of social realism (Galloway 2006).
[3]  The interaction with 8bit culture is not limited to games and music, but extends into the art realm. Cory Archangel’s Super Mario Clouds and the recent exhibit Ich Bin 8-Bit are examples of artistic engagement with 8bit culture (Archangel 2002 and Ablan et al. 2009).
[4]  So far there are four playable songs: Guns N Roses, Sweet Child o’ Mine; Michael Jackson, The Way You Make Me Feel; Daft Punk, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger; A-Ha, The Swing of Things. Chicane, Low Sun and Daft Punk, Aerodynamic are used in the program, but are unplayable as songs.
[5]  The dead end of Baudrillard’s simulation can also be sidestepped by the logic of “social realism” and the phenomenological link between the simulation within the game world and in the player’s lived environment (Galloway 2006).
[6]  While I refer specifically to the computer’s development, it is more useful to link this technological trend to the teleological view of history and civilization that is dominant in modernity.
[7]  This is jagged as I am ignoring the personal computer’s processor, Nintendo’s later consoles and Microsoft’s consoles. I am using these particular consoles as they are the ones that I know the best at the moment.
[8]  It should also be noted that due to the “uncanny valley“ programmers have in many instances attempted more stylized representation in lieu of unsettlingly real and yet not real CGI and polygonal characters (See: Mori 1970).
[10]  In fact, the term “event,” something real, becomes a rare entity within Baudrillard’s work (Galloway 2007).
[11]  This could also be related to Derrida’s discussion of archives as dealing with the future, through the sur-vival of the event as opposed to forgetting, which is superrepression/anarchive and dealing with the past (Derrida 1996).


Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of the Simulacra.” In Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Fish, Phil. “de-makes.” TIGForums Independent Gaming Discussion. The Independent Gaming Source. Written: August 20, 2007. Accessed: March 12, 2009 <>
Mori, Masahiro. “The Uncanny Valley.” Energy 7, 4, 1970: pp. 33-35.
Yu, Derek. “Bootleg Demakes Competition.” The Independent Gaming Source. Accessed: March 12, 2009 <>.


Bungie Software. Pathways Into Darkness. Bungie Software. 1993.
Core Design Ltd. Tomb Raider. Eidos Interactive. 1996.
Harmonix Music Systems. Guitar Hero. RedOctane. 2005.
Id Software. Doom. Id Software. 1993.
—. Doom III. Activision. 2004.
SCEI. Shadow of the Colossus. SCEI. 2005.
Valve Software. Portal. Valve Software. 2007.
—. Team Fortress 2. Valve Software. 2007

Baudrillard and the remake


But what does it mean for the remake and the demake?




memory, archive and sources

Bowker claims that the act of remembering gives no guarantee that the thing will ever be remembered. While this is true, he ignores the bit that A was remembered and not B, meaning that while A might possibly be remembered, B will not. With a limited archive (and we are not omnipotent by any means – regardless of a database’s ability to store, we do not know how to record/archive anywhere near all) there is necessarily limited data to remember.

And this brings me to a comment that a doctoral candidate at the NYU media ecology program said about McLuhan Noam Chomsky in regard to quoting. Roughly, “we quote those people/books/lines that we have (easy) access to.” She quotes from the Chomsky book that she has on her shelf and she has it on her shelf as it is the canonical volume. Similarly, I quote Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice instead of The Logic of Practice because it is on my shelf. We retrieve from the archive only that which was stored; we retrieve from the archive that which was stored in a more accessible manner.

Two and a half years ago a professor told me that communication was about the storage and retreival of information. Technically, I wasn’t in a Communication program at the time (it was Media Ecology/Media, Culture and Communication) and so didn’t think much of the comment. In truth, I didn’t understand the depth and importance of the comment. Communication, in a lot of ways, is about information that has been stored in some way and is/must be retreived in some way. The details are where the study begins. Hence, communication necessitates an archive: library, bookshelf, memory, history et cetera.

This is of course where we return to the concepts of storage (remembering) and retreival (re-membering). We focus so much on the storage capacity and the speed at which we retreive information, but we don’t seem to focus on exactly what is put down into storage. We know we don’t get everything, but we don’t ever really deal with this. Why? Why is there so little work done on the act of remembering especially when it is turned out into the realm of collective memory and history. Is it to naturalize the details remembered? Is it to hide the production? Or any of the other plethora of answers that are possible.

translation and the remake

My MA thesis argued that the Hollywood remake was a form of imperialistic, domesticating translation that mirrored the dominant literary translation style and hid the foreign other. I still believe this.

However, I’ve been thinking more and more about all of the things that slowly steeped into my brain from the words and lectures of my advisor. She works on memory, pleasure, history, time, repetition et cetera. As my work has been leaning more and more toward the area that I was hesitant to hit before (gaming), I’m thinking more and more about remakes and demakes and the logics (cultural, economic, political) at work in those forms and how they are both similar to and different from the logics at work with cinematic remakes. Particularly, I’m mixing the primary idea of translation with that of time.

One of the problems that I ran into with my thesis is the differences between remakes (typological) as they relate to different temporal distances. Which is to say, the meaning/logics in play with a remake is different both the further away it is from the “original” as well as depending on the relationship it has with the “original.” With my thesis I focused almost entirely on a particular form of relationship both to limit the depth of the analysis and to enable a stronger support for my own reading. Obviously, when one compared the remake that moves a film from foreign cinematic tradition to local one (リング to The Ring) my argument held, but when one mixed up those that held different logics (typology) such as earlier time to present (Psycho to Psycho) or versions of a story (Robin Hood to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) the situation became muddled.

While I still believe that there is a certain translational logic that aligns with work done on imperialistic translation styles (eg: Venuti), I am now far enough from the work to be able to recognize and awknowledge the problems with the argument. I realize that even the title of this blog recognizes the transition even if I did not at the moment.

I don’t know where this will lead at the moment, but hopefully the work will lead to interesting conclusions. For now, I can definitely say that I’m looking more into ideas of memory/repetition/pleasure as an offset to themes of translation. This does not mean that I’m abandoning the concept of translation. Far from it, I still believe translation is an incredibly useful term for understanding how texts move between places, but I’ve realized that I can no longer ignore the agency/subjectivity at play causing those texts to move. In order to approach those concepts I need to look elsewhere if I am to avoid the simple false consciousness dead end premature conclusion. While there are certainly systemic aspects determining the form and content of texts as well as the method of movement there is also very real action being taken shaking up the system: fansubs, metatitles and demakes are all born in/as some form of agency/resistance.