How The Mass Media Contributes To Globalization Media

Imagine a world where possibilities are limitless. You could be a soldier fighting in a war one moment, or a space alien across the universe struggling for the survival of your kind in the next. Taking on any role without consequences. Having the freedom to explore vast new worlds. How has gaming as a mass medium become an extended arm that has the potential to contribute to the way we see design and, can change modern design. How do we conjure such scenarios? Where did these ideas come from? Where along the line does culture morph these ideas and how is it being sold to us on the global market, and why in this manner.

2. Background:

Since long ago, people have always wondered what the future would be like; Science fiction was pretty much circulated based upon the ideas of conceptualizing how the people will look like or how they will live. Would they be inhabitants in the sky or dwellers under the sea or even move onto other planets, and even alter realities.

The mass media has always been a huge contributor to globalization, with illustrations depicting cities of the future. Be it by means through movies, TV shows, magazines and so on have all, at one time or another have had their very own coverage shown some form of science fiction and fantasy related material, and from these we have been cultivated and spoon fed what the future is predicted and illustrated to be. This is most definitely the way that everyone, as far back as a century ago, sees it. Citing names such as H.G. Wells and such.

A very good example would be to look at the very well known franchise named 'Star Trek' created in 1966 as a Television series by Gene Roddenberry, has had a huge success and has left powerful lasting impression on the world as a glimpse into the distant future. Controlled by aspects of science fiction and fantasy. Along with William Shatner as Captain Kirk, the art design and set design which depicts environments within the shuttle as being futuristic, and in that sense, to this very day this is the genesis of how we still see and think what embodies the term "Futuristic".

One of the books that I stumbled upon doing research for this paper is titled "Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is reshaping the business forever", this sums up the point I am trying to put across in this essay. Our generation, heavily submerged into technology, often than naught hearing someone say that they are unable live without their personal mobile devices or the Internet for a day and having been exposed to the media with the standard and frequency of today's technology and gaming industry that has capabilities of producing new frontiers of environment that has never been seen before, using the more than capable technology of today as a platform to sell and market these ideas, will definitely have an impact of what we as designers produce in future. The power to detail environments.

The idea of how the future will look like or how things are considered to be "Futuristic", all these ideas had to have come from someone's imagination, and for it to blossom and to reach people on a global scale through the media, only to influence their thoughts and mindsets that drive their minds in turn to think and to paint a picture of what "Futuristic" means and looks like.

An excerpt from John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade's book says that "the total size of the game generation is already far greater than the baby boom ever was", "Right now, there are far more people who speak the language of games than there are baby boomers. This goes to show that the generation to come that will definitely be in a position to shape and design the world in the next phase, and will definitely have a good general understanding from experience since their youth and growing up with something ever so common now a days.

Households with multiple consoles combined with personal computers, game devices, DVD players and even the television are subjected to being fed the views of globalization and have been implanted deep within their minds whether or not they know it, Will associate their lifestyles and lives based on what the mass media puts on and games that they experience in the past and present.

3. Into Gaming:

Gaming provides almost a form of escape from the real world. A freedom to move and do anything the player desires within the generated environment. Allowing anyone to retry and relive and to correct their mistakes combined with the satisfaction of completing the quest at hand.

Gaming allows us to be fully immersed into an alter reality where we can step away from who are and what we do in real life. As games of today compared to games some twenty years ago, have really grown into a whole new breed [fig.1], often more realistic and violent in nature, catering to a more mature audience, becoming anything or anyone the game creators intended you to be, but that's just about where it ends.

Figure 1: Gaming brought to a whole new level with much deeper impact and ability to portray environments

Although virtual reality and gaming is technically a visual three dimensional experience, it is really only being portrayed to you on a two dimensional plane, which exists only within the boundaries of a screen and isn't something that we can grasp with our hands.

However, over the years, a project titled the "I-Cocoon", or the "Immersive cocoon" by Tino Schaedler, a cross disciplinary designer for Film, Architecture and Gaming knew that any sort of interactivity with a computer's interface has had always been limited on a flat surface that did not have any way of allowing users to be transported into a totally different environment and has since come up with the idea of breaking away from the two dimensional gaming user interface and to also remove the limitation of user interactivity while looking at how to create a full physical and immersive environment for a single user.

It is what the name suggests, a dome like cocoon booth with an interior [fig. 2] that is covered with displays, within this dome, integrated motion tracking cameras that will compute the user's body movements into Real-time input which creates the opportunity for interaction.

Figure 2: The I-cocoon's applications, primarily for gaming, provides immersive learning experiences and remote working options

Further proving the point on how the mass media and globalization has crafted and molded the way we see the future, this idea of reach out and grab technology was first seen only in the form of a concept in the movie "Minority Report, 2002" [Fig. 3] which created quite the hype back when it was in the movies.

The reason why it has the capability of mesmer to grab our attention for hours on end is because it provides an interactive and limitless world where dying is an option and you and only you will have the control of what you choose to do with it.

After establishing that the experience of gaming in general is based solely on frames of images projected by a two dimensional plane, the experiences is only limited by its screen. However if we were to transform the idea behind alter reality existing within a two dimensional plane in to a three dimensional space where users feel that they are physically in a world that is separated from the outside based on their mindsets on what they have been brought up and conditioned to identify without much thought of what "futuristic

Article name: How The Mass Media Contributes To Globalization Media essay, research paper, dissertation