http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=Jah450&feedformat=atomDead Media Archive - User contributions [en]2024-03-28T23:52:36ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.25.2http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Electronic_Voice_Phenomena&diff=13843Electronic Voice Phenomena2010-12-15T06:15:12Z<p>Jah450: </p>
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<div>This dossier is currently a work in progress. A more thorough version will be available on Dec. 15, 2010.<br />
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Electronic Voice Phenomena, or E.V.P. are noises, produced electronically, than can be interpreted as speech, but are not the result of intentional recording. <br />
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[[File: Evp soundwave new.jpg|250px|thumb|right|E.V.P. soundwaves]]<br />
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A belief in the possibility of communication with spirits from the afterlife can be traced to ancient civilizations the world over. Our fate after death is the central mystery of humanity. If we exist in some form-- spirit, soul, or ghost, after our last breath, then contact with those who have already made this transition could provide a first- hand answer to this question. Throughout history, mystics, mediums and average citizens have claimed to have accomplished such contact. Without evidence of such experience, most claims are dismissed. In the 19th and 20th centuries advancements in technologies of documentation provided the hope of scientific proof of these experiences, and evidence of life after death. Spirit photography provided the first hope for such substantiation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the possibility that the camera could see into dimensions invisible to the naked eye. With the invention of the phonograph and 20th century advancements in recording technologies, the possibility for auditory proof of the spirit world was awakened. Rumors of E.V.P. experimentation date to the 1920s, but it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the first E.V.P. was recorded. E.V.P. found its place among paranormal hobbyists in the 1970s, but its popularity is generally attributed to two men, stemming from two separate traditions: psychic Atilla Von Szalay in a turn to auditory technologies where spirit photography had failed, and Dr. Konstantin Raudive, professor, philosopher, parapsychologist and student of Carl Jung in plans to stun the academic, spiritual, and scientific communities with the final empirical evidence of human communication with the dead. <br />
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==The Spiritualist Movement==<br />
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[[File:Fox sisters 18521.jpg|225px|thumb|left|Kate and Margaret Fox with sister Leah.]]<br />
Spiritualism is a monotheistic religion rooted in the concept of continuous life, as evidenced by communication with the Spirit World through mediumship (Brandon 2). Though various beliefs in life after death and the possibility of communication with spirits permeate societies throughout the world, both ancient and modern, Spiritualism is unique in its dual position as both religion and science. The faith traces its 1848 origins to the home of young sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox in Hydesville, New York. Evidently, one day, the girls began to hear inexplicable tapping noises in their room. Before long, they created a modified Morse code by which they would communicate with the apparent source of the knocks: the ghost of a peddler who had been murdered in the Foxes’ home and buried in the cellar (Jung 108). Pamphlets quickly circulated attesting to the girl’s experiences. In the wake of grief over civil war casualties many Americans leaped at the possibility of communication with friends and relatives in the afterlife. Séances became commonplace in both public and private settings and mediumship proliferated (Jolly 9). At its peak in the 1890s the Spiritualist movement was said to have more than eight million members in the United States and Europe (McGarry 2). Believers and converts watched with rapt attention as mediums communicated with the dead through tapping, like the Fox sisters, or fell into trance-like states and spoke in the voices of the dead, proving the existence of life after death. As Carl Jung described the movement, “Because of its dual nature- on the one side a religious sect, on the other a scientific hypothesis- spiritualism touches upon widely differing areas of life that would seem to have nothing in common” (Psychology and the Occult 108). Spiritualism’s place at the intersection of religion and science laid the foundation for a unique and fascinating relationship between religion and technology. Throughout the 20th century, Spiritualists looked to emerging technologies as ancillary tools of the medium, whose aid could not only conjure the images and voices of spirits, but record them as well.<br />
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==Spirit Photography==<br />
[[File:Mumler (Lincoln).jpg|225px|thumb|right|William Mumler's spirit photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln and her husband's ghost.]]<br />
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Widespread Spiritualism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries owes its proliferation to the Victorian notion that the camera not only captured reality, but might see more than the naked eye (Green-Lewis 232). The first official spirit photography was developed in 1861 by William S. Mumler in his Boston studio during an experiment with self-portraiture. Mumler reported the appearance of a diaphanous figure, next to his own, resembling a cousin who had died thirteen years earlier (Jolly 14). The photograph soon appeared in numerous Spiritualist publications as the first printed evidence of the existence of spirits. Soon average citizens were doling out large sums for portraits by Mumler, as well as the work of spirit photographers following in his footsteps around the world. Mumler’s most famous portrait presents a seated Mary Todd Lincoln with a ghost translucent image of her deceased husband, his hands on her shoulders (18). Spirit photographers took pictures of individual sitters with the translucent ghosts of deceased loved ones, but also captured spirit materializations during medium trances, psychics conjuring various spirit guides, and the emergence of paranormal material or ectoplasm from the bodies of female mediums. Before public understanding of photographic processes or the possibility of double exposure, Spiritualists, for a time, were given a vast body of seemingly scientific evidence proving the existence and proximity of a spirit world. The height of American and European Spiritualism is inextricably tied to the early years of photography. At a time when photographs were considered scientific proof, spirit photographs showed beings from the afterlife in contact with the living. <br />
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[[File:Spirit photos 1910.png|225px|thumb|left|Spirit photographs 1910]]<br />
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However, the foundation of this proof was slowly shattered. In 1869 William Mumler was tried for fraud. Though not convicted at the time, he admitted some years later that his body of work was largely the result of a simple process of double exposure (20). As more and more people became amateur or professional photographers and gained knowledge of photographic processes, it became easy to conceptualize how spirit photographs might be the result of certain practices or idiosyncrasies. By the 1920s double exposure became an established artistic practice in the works of Surrealist artists like Man Ray. Spirit photographs, once veritable proof of communication with spirits of the afterlife moved, to a position as kitsch objects of a time when mourners and dabblers in the paranormal were easily duped by the fresh magic of photography. Though the number of practicing Spiritualists dwindled when its chief “scientific” evidence was sullied, true adherents to the Spiritualist movement trudged on, cementing its existence to the present day. Throughout the twentieth century Spiritualist meetings and séances have been the main setting in which mediums proved the existence of continuous life-- mediums serving as conduits for the messages of the dead to the living. The life of spirit photography serves as a case study for the life of Electronic Voice Phenomena, but also likely provided inspiration for those who dreamed of scientific proof of the afterlife and desperately searched for it with new communication and recording technologies. <br />
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==Atilla Von Szalay==<br />
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Though the late 1960s work of Dr. Konstantin Raudive is widely credited as having founded the practice of E.V.P. experimentation, the first published work on the phenomena was a collaboration between two men, Atilla Von Szalay and Raymond Bayless, in 1959 (Rogo 84). Von Szalay was a photographer and clairvoyant whose experiments with spirit photography had proved disappointing (Rogo 86). Von Szalay frequently heard disembodied voices in the air around him and his experiments were an attempt to find and document their source. He began audio experimentation with psychologist Raymond Bayless in Los Angeles in the early 1950s (86). At first the pair attempted to record Von Szalay’s voices with a Pack-Bell record cutter, but captured no results. Eventually an enclosed wooden closet was constructed for Attila to sit in and wait for the voices to occur. The men rented an empty studio in Hollywood where they positioned their construction (Ibid 87). Inside of the wooden enclosure, a microphone was placed inside of a speaker trumpet to pick up any voices inside of the closet. A tape recorder and a speaker, wired to the microphone, were positioned outside the walls, so that one could listen for and record any noise or voices emanating from the wardrobe (88). <br />
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[[File:Raymond bayless.png|225px|thumb|right|Raymond Bayless]]<br />
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In this case Von Szalay served the role of medium as it was the voices that had followed him, since long before the experiments, that he and Bayless hoped to record. Von Szalay was not only a participant in the work, but his thoughts were considered a key component of the closet- recording apparatus. His psychic mind was thought to channel any intelligible noises recorded during the experiments. His mediumship powered the machine (86). This second round of work was quite successful for the duo. Noises, whispers, and mechanical sounding voices were observed and recorded whether or not Von Szalay was inside the closet. The voices were interpreted as both male and female and spoke in short sentences, only a few words at a time (87). Eventually, Von Szalay stepped out of the cabinet and recorded the voices at different locations, constructing various cabinet-like devices, some of which were kept in his apartment. At times, the voices emanating from Von Szalay’s mind seemed to possess knowledge of distant thoughts and events. On September 30th, 1971, Bayless was having a private conversation with his wife at home about how he was becoming increasingly misanthropic and shunning social interactions. At the same time, across town, in Van Nuys, Von Szalay was experimenting with a machine that seemed to record the sentence “Bayless is virtually become a recluse” (88). While Von Szalay and Bayless were the first to experiment with E.V.P. extensively, as well as, to record and publish their findings, it is a European scholar who is credited with the birth of E.V.P.<br />
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==Jung, Psychoanalysis and the Paranormal==<br />
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Carl Jung was born into a fascination with the paranormal. Samuel Preiswerk, Jung’s maternal grandfather believed himself to be surrounded by ghosts, dedicating one day each week to conversation with his posthumous first wife, whom he kept a chair for in his study. Grandfather Preiswerk’s second wife, Augusta, was considered clairoyant. Jung’s mother, Emilie kept a diary dedicated to “strange experiences”( On Synchronicity and the Paranormal 2). Jung’s own paranormal experiences began at the age of seven or eight, as he described “One night I saw coming from (my mother’s) door a faintly luminous , indefinite figure whose head detached itself from the neck and floated along in front of it, in the air, like a little moon” (2). Jung’s doctoral thesis “ On the psychology and pathology of so-called Occult Phenomena” was a report on a series of séances conducted by his young female cousin. A partial reason for Jung’s initial break with his teacher, Freud, was likely the mentor’s inability to inability to consider spiritualistic phenomena in a “non-pathological light” (5). Jung’s public beliefs about the paranormal vacillated throughout his career, on occasion leaning towards a purely psychological explanation. Yet, Jung always seemed to return to the notion that it would be impossible for such widespread and disparate experience to be dismissed as a phantasm of the mind, as evidenced in a 1948 statement, “After collecting psychological experiences from many people and many countries for over fifty years…To put it bluntly, I doubt whether an exclusively psychological approach can do justice to the phenomena in question” (6). <br />
[[File:24965-004-63849e2c.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Carl Jung]]<br />
Jung continued to observe séances, table turnings and Spiritualist gatherings throughout his career. He was also greatly influenced by the experiments of J.B. Rhine in the first parapsychology institute at Duke University, established in 1932 (15). Rhine and Jung carried out a thirty-year correspondence from 1934 to 1954. Their conversations were of great importance for Jung’s conception of the theory of synchronicity (16). Though Jung is not best known for his more eccentric works on parapsychology and the occult, his intelligence and education make his considerations of the paranormal the most scholarly writings on the topic. Jung carved the way for academics of the 1960s to further explore unusual aspects of the unconscious and search for empirical evidence of paranormal phenomena. Latvian, philosopher, and pre-eminent E.V.P. researcher Konstantin Raudive may have been one of Jung’s most unusual students, but could also be considered the ideal progeny of his lifelong battle, as a rational thinker, with his irrational experiences with the paranormal and his quest through family members, observation and Dr. Rhine to discern the physical veracity of his and all other psychic experiences.<br />
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==Breakthrough==<br />
[[File:Brere.jpg|225px|thumb|right|Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communications with the Dead]]<br />
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The work of Konstantin Raudive, as documented in his 1971 work Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communications with the Dead is part culmination of Raudive’s thoughts as a philosopher and student of Carl Jung, espousing Raudive’s sentiments about the possibility of continuous life. As a scholar, the majority of his career spent at the Univeristy of Uppsala in Sweden, Raudive’s main preoccupation was with the afterlife; Breakthrough seems to be his only major publication. Raudive’s considerations are interesting, but wouldn’t be possible without the results of the experiments, which occupy the vast majority of the book and the accompanying recording. Raudive’s owes his original technique to a layman, his collaborator, Frederich Jurgenson. <br />
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[[File:0aabiggeroenijkl.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Frederich Jurgenson]]<br />
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Frederich Jurgenson was a Swedish renaissance man of the mid-twentieth century. He attended art school and trained as a musician (Rogo 85). As a painter he had been commissioned for two official portraits of Pope Pius XII (Raymond Bayless Foundation). Jurgenson was also a filmmaker and a psychic. One afternoon Jurgenson set out to document bird sounds in the woods. When he took the tape home and listened to it there were numerous voices recorded, which were inexplicable from his experience in the woods (Raudive 3). Jurgenson forgot about the bird-calls and commenced experimentation with E.V.P. and reel to reel tape recorders. He published his work in a 1964 volume titled Voices From Space (3). “He heard not only the voices of near relatives or friends, but also those of historical personages of the recent past, such as Hitler, Goring, Felix Kersten, the Yoga-author Boris Sacharow, the controversial Chessman…” (14). Raudive found Jurgenson’s small book shortly after publication in 1964 and the two began work together in 1965, culminating with the publication of Breakthrough. Raudive, with Jurgenson’s aid, experimented with tape recorders, microphones, and radio, documenting their work in great detail, with Raudive pondering its implications for humanity. <br />
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Breakthrough commences with Raudive’s analysis of the meaning of his experiments with Jurgenson. It is clear form this writing that Raudive was thrilled with his findings, which he considers world changing. Raudive believed that the tape, recorder, radio, and microphone, as mechanical devices provided empirical evidence, “…and their objectivity cannot be challenged” (1). Raudive also knew that audio technologies would soon evolve and gain new capabilities, allowing him to project a bright future for E.V.P. “The present stage of the investigation reveals this contact as, so far, only the delicate, fleeting pulse of a new reality, not more than vaguely discernible as yet, because of our lack of experience and inadequacy in our technical aids” (2). Raudive believed the experiments recorded in Breakthrough were just the birth-pangs of whole new set of realizations for mankind, which he could be credited with. “ Only someone who himself ventures to plumb these inaccessible layers of human existence, where we discern neither beginning nor end, only a forward compulsion of our selves and our lives, can assess the true position” (2). Raudive fancied himself a spiritualistic and parapsychological messiah, delivering the great realization of the existence of continuous life on LP recordings. <br />
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<blockquote>"My research has led me to the personal conclusion that apart from the biological-physical level on which we human beings here exist, there is a second level: that of the psychical-spiritual level, whose potentialities are only released after death. This psychical-spiritual being tried to build a bridge between its world and that of our earthly form of life, and it endeavors on its own initiative to make contact in order to guide those on earth into a new reality "(2).</blockquote><br />
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[[File:Raudive.gif|250px|thumb|right|Konstantin Raudive]]<br />
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In Raudive’s mind, the E.V.P. recordings he had made, were just the beginnings of the scientific work that would change the way human beings thought about life. <br />
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<blockquote>"It is quite possible that one day results will emerge from the voice experiments that will have a bearing on the highest, indeed the ultimate goal man has sought throughout the ages and is still seeking- the answer to the question: who am I and where am I going? Death might then be seen as no more than a metamorphosis from one state of development to another" (2). </blockquote><br />
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As Raudive saw it, his body of work was the scientific answer to the age-old questions of every religious or spiritual sect. He recognized that paranormal claims were not novel, but consistently re-iterates the “empirical nature” of his E.V.P. evidence, quickly dismissing the possibility of a psychological explanation. Raudive contends that E.V.P. phenomena cannot be dismissed as a product of the unconscious, as the unconscious may very well simply be a panacea that explains this very type of phenomena, inexplicable to the rational human mind. Raudive quotes his professor, Jung. “…psychology can know nothing about the substance of the psyche, because it cannot realize anything except through the psyche. One can therefore neither deny nor confirm the validity of such terms as Mana, Daemon, or God; but one can note that the feeling of unfamiliarity, which is connected with the experience of the objective, is authentic” (8). According to Raudive, the experiments detailed in Breakthrough, constituted unequivocal evidence of spirits of the afterlife, who sought communication with the living. <br />
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The first meaningful recording that Raudive took through microphone ostensibly said, in Latvian, Raudive’s native language “ That is right” (17). Raudive details five methods for obtaining and recording E.V.P.<br />
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1. Microphone Recording<br />
<blockquote> "Speed can be adjusted to 3 ¾ i.p.s. or 7 ½ i.p.s. Jurgenson considers a speed of 7 ½ i.p.s. more suitable to the fast talking voices, but Raudive’s personal experiments produced even clearer voices at 3 ¾ i.p.s. Sessions can consist of a number of people in a room or a single individual. After the microphone is set up to record and the tape starts sessions should not last more than ten or fifteen minutes. People can conjure the names of dead relatives and ask questions of the spirits. Gossiping is to be avoided. Microphone voices tend to be soft, so participants are advised to speak slowly, loudly and clearly. Microphone voices fall into three grades of audibility:<br />
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a) Can be heard and identified by those with normal human hearing and knowledge of the language spoken (several hundred of Raudive’s E.V.P. recordings fall into this group)<br />
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b) Consists of voices that speak more rapidly and more softly but are still quite plainly audible to a trained and attentive ear. <br />
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c) Consists of the most interesting voices; voices that give us a great deal of information and much paranormal data. Unfortunately, these can be heard only in fragments, even by a trained ear, but with improved technical aids, it may eventually become possible to hear and demonstrate these voices, which lie beyond our range of hearing, without trouble" (21).</blockquote><br />
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[[File:Images-1.jpeg|250px|thumb|left|1960s transistor radio]]<br />
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2. Radio Recordings<br />
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In Voices from Space Jurgenson maintains that no radio recordings could be made without a “mediator” ( 22). A mediator is usually the disembodied voice of a woman(23). At the end of 1965 Raudive identified once such mediator, by the Latvian name Spidola. <br />
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<blockquote>"If one is relying on the help of the ‘mediator,’ one glides slowly from one end of the wavelength-scale to the other and listens carefully for a voice that will his ‘Now’ or ‘Make Recording’ or some such hint. At that precise moment one turns on the tape recorder. Radio voices too can be grouped into three grades of audibility; but they differ from microphone-voices in that their pronunciation is clearer and their messages are longer and have more meaning. We know that radio waves penetrate the human body without being registered by the sense organs. Electro-magnetic fields within us continually make music or speeches and perhaps these voices from ‘beyond’ also cry out for contact within us and we fail to hear them" (23). </blockquote><br />
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3. Radio- Microphone Recordings<br />
Raudive discovered a method of combined Radio and Microphone recording by chance one day while playing back a previous recording. Apparently a voice on the tape demanded “signals” (24). <br />
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<blockquote>"Suppressing my astonishment I followed this strange recording to the end. When the tape had run through I fixed a fresh one, as I intended to make a radio-voice recording, but I forgot to adjust the tape recorder so that in effect the recording was made through microphone while the radio connection remained in operation. On playing the tape back I discovered several voices; by mistake, so to speak, I had stumbled upon a method which opened up quite new possibilities of registering conversation. By this method the voices can enter into discussions and answer questions "(24).</blockquote><br />
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This method of recording was quite similar to that of radio recording, but the tape recorder stayed switched to microphone, with the microphone placed very close to the radio. It was optimal to turn the radio to a wavelength with no transmission only the “rushing sound” (24). Broadcast voices would sometimes interfere with Raudive’s work, but could be separated from the E.V.P. voices as they did not posses they characteristic language, speed and timber of the E.V.P. voices.<br />
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4. Frequency Transmitter Recording<br />
<blockquote>"This method excludes freak noises from radio and microphone: only carrier frequencies operate and these are used by the voice-entities. The voices thus recorded show the same traits as those of other recording materials. Their statements are often slightly overlaid by sinus-frequencies, but their audibility is good and they are free from other interferences. Up to several hundred voices recorded in this fashion have been definitely verified…"(25).</blockquote><br />
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[[File:800px-Diode-closeup.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Diode closeup]]<br />
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5. Diode Recording<br />
<blockquote>"In this highly interesting method the recording is made directly from the room on to the tap. For various reasons it is a complicated process. The length of the aerial (6-8cm) had to be precisely adjusted, and vibrations sent out by the voices are received by this aerial. In quality the voices thus received come closest to those of ordinary human ones, although we find exactly the same peculiarities as before. When this last method has been further developed and perfected, we shall be able to regard it as a direct contact, in every sense of the word, with the unseen entities. Results of the diode-recordings can be heard without great difficulty even by the untrained and unprepared ear. One had the impression that the voices speak directly on to the tape; they have spaceless quality, an immediate impact and their diction is remarkably clear; they are instantly received and can be heard without atmospheric interferences "(25). </blockquote><br />
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In the Raudivian methodology, once E.V.P. was recorded, it had to be interpreted. As previously described, these voices possessed characteristics and language, unlike that of any earthly speech. “ They speak in an unmistakable rhythm and usually employ several languages in a single sentence; the sentence construction obeys rules that differ radically from those of ordinary speech and, although, the voices seem to speak in the same way as we do, the anatomy of their ‘speech apparatus’ must be different from our own” (27). The ear had to attune itself to listen for E.V.P. voices. Individuals with musical training were apparently more adept at picking up voices quickly (8). Though numerous languages often appeared in one sentence, the words were pronounced in a uniform manner. Sentences were terse in a fast, rhythmic “telegram style” mode. Raudive postulated on the unique anatomy of the spirit speech apparatus and the restriction it might have imposed “…grammatical rules are frequently abandoned and neologisms abound” (29). Raudive concluded that spirits were different, evolved in some way from their terrestrial bodies speaking to us in the universal language of the afterlife. An LP recording of the E.V.P. experiments, along with narration by Raudive and voice interpretation by his assistants was released alongside the book’s publication. The experiments are some of the same which appear in the book’s transcripts and present all technological methods of E.V.P. used to communicate with dead friends, relatives, strangers, and historical figures. <br />
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[[File:Brere2.jpg|250px|thumb|left|Diode Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communications with the Dead LP]]<br />
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Side A: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEAg7jUcAOQ<br />
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Side B: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bAR0IhUnV8&feature=related<br />
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Raudive likely owes the publication of Breakthrough to its final section. In the book’s introduction publisher Peter Bender describes his initial skepticism towards the book and Raudive, as just another eccentric among the “ host who are set on telling us that life after death is a reality which can be scientifically proven” (vii). Bender would have dismissed the book were it not for the final section of testimonial letters by scientists and religious figures whom he knew “to be of the highest integrity and incapable of supporting anything scientifically suspect…”(xv) In fact, over four hundred people participated in Raudive’s E.V.P. experiments, many highly educated and well respected. Many wrote letters attesting to the important of Raudive’s work, but also as simple testimony of their participation in the experiments. These testifiers included: Rev. Prof. Dr. Gebhard Frei of the Mission Society of Bethlehem, a Roman Catholic Priest and President of the International Society of Catholic Parapsychologists, Dr. Zenta Maurina, Writer and Doctor of Philosophy, leading authority on the works of Dostoevsky, and Dr. Hans Naegli, psychiatrist and President of the Society for the parapsychology, Switzerland. <br />
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In spite of the letters of recommendation and some of the most meticulous paranormal research of the 20th century, Raudive’s experiments failed to gain the attention he predicted. Raudive died a few years after the publication of Breakthrough in 1974. Frederich Jurgenson continued to experiment with E.V.P. until his death in 1987 and helped to facilitate new paranormal, E.V.P. related research through television. Whether deserving of the credit, Konstantin Raudive is hailed as the father of E.V.P. experimentation and the “scientific” experiments detailed in Breakthrough were considered the golden standard in E.V.P.<br />
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==Magical Thinking==<br />
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==Detecting Techno-Spiritual Unity==<br />
[[File:Reel-to-reel recorder tc-630.jpg|250px|thumb|right|A reel-to-reel recorder.]]<br />
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Electronic Voice Phenomena, as one facet in a diverse array of paranormal perceptions, exists within a centuries-old spiritualist traditions of contacting the dead, but uses recording technology alongside a 'sensitive' listener as media to interface with the dead. According to Lawrence Leshan, the term 'sensitive' as a noun is used by many who study or pursue paranormal sensory phenomena to describe individuals who are exceptionally likely to experience paranormal states of awareness.<br />
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In many instances of contact with ghosts, a sensitive is the main medium between ghosts and lay people. Many media have used automatic writing or similar inscriptive techniques to record what they are told by a spirit, but the sensitive nonetheless occupies a central position in the reception of paranormal communication as well as its transmission in another, more commonly legible forms-- for instance, writing or speech. This model of paranormal communication could be described as direct transmission or single step communication between ghosts and their human media.<br />
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Since at least 1860, however, spiritualists have also located ghostly content in mechanically produced media like photography (See [[Spirit Photography]] for more information). When locating spiritual content in a mechanically produced medium, the role of a human medium is fundamentally altered.<br />
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The human medium that detects EVP in recorded sound, to apply Avital Ronnell's reading of technologically enabled spiritualism, is required to “take second place” (247), assuming the role of observer to the more frictionless transmission between spirits and a technical medium. The first step of this transmission occurs between a ghost and a machine, while the human interpretation thereof occurs afterward.<br />
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The human medium's second position in EVP is a notable departure from one-step transmissions between ghosts and media that takes place in direct spirit-human communication. Lawrence Leshan, for example, observed that a sensitive's “will must be passive” (36) if s/he is to enter a subjectivity conducive to receiving direct spiritual communication, abstaining from activity of the body and mind so as to facilitate transmission of spectral information. The type of 'passivity' required by direct spirit communication is distinct from that required in the act of repeatedly playing or manipulating a sound recording in search of EVP, however. EVP sensitives, while passive at some stages of locating and interpreting transmissions, must engage directly with various recording and playback technologies at others. <br />
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The will-lessness of a sensitive in direct spiritual communication may, in certain ways, be one of the “pretechnological concepts” that Ronnell posits to be threatened with “unemployment” as it is replaced with newer, more technologically contemporary models. The technical expertise needed to produce, re-produce or find meaning in an EVP recording, for example, provides an alternative to the “high carelessness” (37) crucial in direct contact spiritualism, a passivity that allows information to be gathered without origin in a specific source or sense. The focus on one sense (hearing) and a very particular tool (recording/playback technology) is less will-less and careless than the unfocused sense needed to experience direct human-spirit contact. This shift requires a transition from unfocused reading of broad and diffuse sensory (and extra-sensory) application to the focused study of a technological 'lense' into the spirit realm. Thus un-focused perception is rendered 'unemployed' by the focused EVP-seeker.<br />
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[[File:Cassette.jpg|250px|thumb|left|A cassette tape recorder.]]<br />
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EVP does not only replace old models of spiritualist subjectivity, however, it also enables new ones. John J. Kucich, for example, identifies a diverse range of American Spiritualist traditions as simultaneously “universal and culturally specific” (153). Spiritualist practices are universal in their effect of rendering receiver and transmitter (either ghost or ghost-as-mediated-through-technology) “part in the great pattern and harmony which includes all unique events” (Leshan 44), as evidence in the consistency to be found within a given cosmology, as evidence a particular model of life and afterlife's pervasiveness. The distinctness between various spiritualist techniques subsequently reveals distinction between various cosmologies.<br />
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Whereas one-step spiritualism has historically 'empowered the disposessed subject' (Ronnell 249) that receives communication from ghosts through will-lessness, technical spiritualism and EVP replace the direct connection between spirit and life worlds with one that is mediated by technology. In effect, sound recordings are set up to make closer contact with the afterlife than their human listeners.<br />
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==Replacing Human Media: Mechanically Mediating Spiritual Communication==<br />
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Kucich asserts that spiritualist practices have significantly “mediated the power relations within and between cultures in the United States” (xiii), both empowering the dispossessed and also providing a popular target for discriminatory treatment of believers as “unlettered” and “provincial” (43). The use of recorded sound as a medium is a rebuttal of such critiques that mobilizes technical skill as a marker of media and technological literacy to remediate the classist conflict between spiritualism's believers and nonbelievers. By ascribing the power to contact spirits not to a human, but to a machine, the machine serves as a distancing tool, deflecting certain criticisms from the spiritualist to his or her machine. <br />
<br />
EVP, by mobilizing socially acceptable skill sets like consumer electronic prowess and the purchase of recordings, casts paranormal subjectivities as reasonable technological and consumer behavior. In listening to a recording for EVP, humans may still need to enter a will-less subjectivity or other paranormal state of consciousness, but these altered states are historically seen within Spiritualist circles as neither less or more valid than other more normative states (Kucich 42). Rather, spiritualists typically believe that the utility of entering a particular state of perception “depends on what you are trying to do” (ibid). In terms of protecting one's self from the discrimination typical leveled against direct spiritual communicators, receiving transmissions from the dead secondhand via recording technology is often deemed preferable.<br />
<br />
==Liminal Consciousnesses==<br />
<br />
Because of the requirement that technological spiritualists remain conscious enough to operate their equipment, locating EVP in a recording may be best accomplished while occupying some liminal state of consciousness between complete paranormal receptivity and that of normal listening practices.<br />
<br />
In entering a state of technological spiritualist consciousness, the EVP-seeker must observe a unity between the life and spirit worlds, locating its presence consistently in their sound technologies as well as in sound itself. <br />
<br />
==Backward Masking==<br />
<br />
==Commodifying the Uncanny: Hell Awaits==<br />
[[File:SlayerHellAwaits.jpg|250px|thumb|right|Hell Awaits. Slayer, 1985. Simi Valley, CA: Metal Blade Records]]<br />
<br />
The sounds of EVP, existing in recorded format, are always available for circulation not only as spiritual information but also as commercial products. Consequently, the aesthetics of EVP are easily commodified, simulted, and sold as part of commercial recordings.<br />
<br />
Reversed voices, which sound quite similar to many instances of EVP, are one example of this commodifiable uncanniness. Heavy metal band Slayer, for example, deployed reversed voice recordings in their 1985 album “Hell Awaits”. The voices are recorded saying “Join Us”, then reversed in order to convey an unnatural control over time and sound. By using the aesthetic of earlier EVP recordings, Slayer reposition themselves as the controllers of uncanny sounds. The privileged unity between technology and spirits is appropriated, manipulated and desecrated. Slayer's ability to reproduce EVP-like sounds at will contextualizes EVP as 'unemployed', just another spooky audio trick. A listener in the liminal state of EVP-seeking consciousness might believe he or she is being beckoned by a chorus of dead souls, while the musicians would likely take mephistolean glee at the notion that they manipulated such a 'sensitive' listener.<br />
<br />
[[category:fall 2010]][[category:spiritualism]][[category:music]][[category:recording]][[category:recorded sound]]<br />
<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
<br />
<br />
Brandon, Ruth. The Spiritualists New York: Knopf, 1983<br />
<br />
Green-Lewis, Jennifer Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.<br />
<br />
Jolly, Martyn Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography. London. The British Library, 2006.<br />
<br />
Jung, C.G. Psychology and the Occult. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press, 1977<br />
<br />
Jung, C.G. On Synchronicity and the Paranormal. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press, 1997<br />
<br />
Kucich, John J. "Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press 2004.<br />
<br />
LeShan, Lawrence L. "Toward a General Theory of the Paranormal: A Report of Work in Progress". Columbus, OH: Parapsychology Foundation Inc. 1973.<br />
<br />
McGarry, Molly. Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth Century America. Berkeley, CA. University of California Press, 2008.<br />
<br />
Raudive, Konstantin. Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communications with the Dead. New York. Taplinger, 1971<br />
<br />
Rogo, D. Scott and Raymond Bayless. Phone Calls from the Dead. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice Hall, 1979<br />
<br />
Ronell, Avital. "The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech". Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Cassette.jpg&diff=13842File:Cassette.jpg2010-12-15T06:02:49Z<p>Jah450: By WikiMedia Commons user Evan-Amos. Released to Public Domain. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RadioShack-ctr-119.jpg</p>
<hr />
<div>By WikiMedia Commons user Evan-Amos. Released to Public Domain. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RadioShack-ctr-119.jpg</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Reel-to-reel_recorder_tc-630.jpg&diff=13841File:Reel-to-reel recorder tc-630.jpg2010-12-15T05:45:57Z<p>Jah450: Reel to reel tape recorder. Photo by WikiMedia Commons user NixDorf. For licensing information: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reel-to-reel_recorder_tc-630.jpg</p>
<hr />
<div>Reel to reel tape recorder. Photo by WikiMedia Commons user NixDorf. For licensing information: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reel-to-reel_recorder_tc-630.jpg</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:SlayerHellAwaits.jpg&diff=13840File:SlayerHellAwaits.jpg2010-12-15T05:36:37Z<p>Jah450: Cover to "Hell Awaits" LP by Slayer, Metal Blade Records 1985.
Source/Licensing info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SlayerHellAwaits.jpg</p>
<hr />
<div>Cover to "Hell Awaits" LP by Slayer, Metal Blade Records 1985. <br />
Source/Licensing info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SlayerHellAwaits.jpg</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Electronic_Voice_Phenomena&diff=13394Electronic Voice Phenomena2010-12-12T21:10:05Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>This dossier is currently a work in progress. A more thorough version will be available on Dec. 15, 2010.<br />
<br />
==Detecting Techno-Spiritual Unity==<br />
<br />
Electronic Voice Phenomena, as one facet in a diverse array of paranormal perceptions, exists within a centuries-old spiritualist traditions of contacting the dead, but uses recording technology alongside a 'sensitive' listener as media to interface with the dead. According to Lawrence Levan, the term 'sensitive' as a noun is used by many who study or pursue paranormal sensory phenomena to describe individuals who are exceptionally likely to experience paranormal states of awareness.<br />
<br />
In many instances of contact with ghosts, a sensitive is the main medium between ghosts and lay people. Many media have used automatic writing or similar inscriptive techniques to record what they are told by a spirit, but the sensitive nonetheless occupies a central position in the reception of paranormal communication as well as its transmission in another, more commonly legible forms-- for instance, writing or speech. This model of paranormal communication could be described as direct transmission or single step communication between ghosts and their human media.<br />
<br />
Since at least 1860, however, spiritualists have also located ghostly content in mechanically produced media like photography (See [[Spirit Photography]] for more information). When locating spiritual content in a mechanically produced medium, the role of a human medium is fundamentally altered.<br />
<br />
The human medium that detects EVP in recorded sound, to apply Avital Ronnell's reading of technologically enabled spiritualism, is required to “take second place” (247), assuming the role of observer to the more frictionless transmission between spirits and a technical medium. The first step of this transmission occurs between a ghost and a machine, while the human interpretation thereof occurs afterward.<br />
<br />
The human medium's second position in EVP is a notable departure from one-step transmissions between ghosts and media that takes place in direct spirit-human communication. Lawrence Levan, for example, observed that a sensitive's “will must be passive” (36) if s/he is to enter a subjectivity conducive to receiving direct spiritual communication, abstaining from activity of the body and mind so as to facilitate transmission of spectral information. The type of 'passivity' required by direct spirit communication is distinct from that required in the act of repeatedly playing or manipulating a sound recording in search of EVP, however. EVP sensitives, while passive at some stages of locating and interpreting transmissions, must engage directly with various recording and playback technologies at others. <br />
<br />
The will-lessness of a sensitive in direct spiritual communication may, in certain ways, be one of the “pretechnological concepts” that Ronnell posits to be threatened with “unemployment” as it is replaced with newer, more technologically contemporary models. The technical expertise needed to produce, re-produce or find meaning in an EVP recording, for example, provides an alternative to the “high carelessness” (37) crucial in direct contact spiritualism, a passivity that allows information to be gathered without origin in a specific source or sense. The focus on one sense (hearing) and a very particular tool (recording/playback technology) is less will-less and careless than the unfocused sense needed to experience direct human-spirit contact. This shift requires a transition from unfocused reading of broad and diffuse sensory (and extra-sensory) application to the focused study of a technological 'lense' into the spirit realm. Thus un-focused perception is rendered 'unemployed' by the focused EVP-seeker.<br />
<br />
EVP does not only replace old models of spiritualist subjectivity, however, it also enables new ones. John J. Kucich, for example, identifies a diverse range of American Spiritualist traditions as simultaneously “universal and culturally specific” (153). Spiritualist practices are universal in their effect of rendering receiver and transmitter (either ghost or ghost-as-mediated-through-technology) “part in the great pattern and harmony which includes all unique events” (Levan 44), as evidence in the consistency to be found within a given cosmology, as evidence a particular model of life and afterlife's pervasiveness. The distinctness between various spiritualist techniques subsequently reveals distinction between various cosmologies.<br />
<br />
Whereas one-step spiritualism has historically 'empowered the disposessed subject' (Ronnell 249) that receives communication from ghosts through will-lessness, technical spiritualism and EVP replace the direct connection between spirit and life worlds with one that is mediated by technology. In effect, sound recordings are set up to make closer contact with the afterlife than their human listeners.<br />
<br />
==Replacing Human Media: Mechanically Mediating Spiritual Communication==<br />
<br />
Kucich asserts that spiritualist practices have significantly “mediated the power relations within and between cultures in the United States” (xiii), both empowering the dispossessed and also providing a popular target for discriminatory treatment of believers as “unlettered” and “provincial” (43). The use of recorded sound as a medium is a rebuttal of such critiques that mobilizes technical skill as a marker of media and technological literacy to remediate the classist conflict between spiritualism's believers and nonbelievers. By ascribing the power to contact spirits not to a human, but to a machine, the machine serves as a distancing tool, deflecting certain criticisms from the spiritualist to his or her machine. <br />
<br />
EVP, by mobilizing socially acceptable skill sets like consumer electronic prowess and the purchase of recordings, casts paranormal subjectivities as reasonable technological and consumer behavior. In listening to a recording for EVP, humans may still need to enter a will-less subjectivity or other paranormal state of consciousness, but these altered states are historically seen within Spiritualist circles as neither less or more valid than other more normative states (Kucich 42). Rather, spiritualists typically believe that the utility of entering a particular state of perception “depends on what you are trying to do” (ibid). In terms of protecting one's self from the discrimination typical leveled against direct spiritual communicators, receiving transmissions from the dead secondhand via recording technology is often deemed preferable.<br />
<br />
==Liminal Consciousnesses==<br />
<br />
Because of the requirement that technological spiritualists remain conscious enough to operate their equipment, locating EVP in a recording may be best accomplished while occupying some liminal state of consciousness between complete paranormal receptivity and that of normal listening practices.<br />
<br />
In entering a state of technological spiritualist consciousness, the EVP-seeker must observe a unity between the life and spirit worlds, locating its presence consistently in their sound technologies as well as in sound itself. <br />
<br />
==Commodifying the Uncanny: Hell Awaits==<br />
<br />
The sounds of EVP, existing in recorded format, are always available for circulation not only as spiritual information but also as commercial products. Consequently, the aesthetics of EVP are easily commodified, simulted, and sold as part of commercial recordings.<br />
<br />
Reversed voices, which sound quite similar to many instances of EVP, are one example of this commodifiable uncanniness. Heavy metal band Slayer, for example, deployed reversed voice recordings in their 1985 album “Hell Awaits”. The voices are recorded saying “Join Us”, then reversed in order to convey an unnatural control over time and sound. By using the aesthetic of earlier EVP recordings, Slayer reposition themselves as the controllers of uncanny sounds. The privileged unity between technology and spirits is appropriated, manipulated and desecrated. Slayer's ability to reproduce EVP-like sounds at will contextualizes EVP as 'unemployed', just another spooky audio trick. A listener in the liminal state of EVP-seeking consciousness might believe he or she is being beckoned by a chorus of dead souls, while the musicians would likely take mephistolean glee at the notion that they manipulated such a 'sensitive' listener.<br />
<br />
[[category:fall 2010]][[category:spiritualism]][[category:music]][[category:recording]][[category:recorded sound]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Electronic_Voice_Phenomena&diff=13351Electronic Voice Phenomena2010-12-11T22:20:04Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>This dossier is currently a work in progress. A completed version 1.0 will be available on Dec. 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
==Detecting Techno-Spiritual Unity==<br />
<br />
Electronic Voice Phenomena, as one facet in a diverse array of paranormal perceptions, exists within a centuries-old spiritualist traditions of contacting the dead, but uses recording technology alongside a 'sensitive' listener as media to interface with the dead. According to Lawrence Levan, the term 'sensitive' as a noun is used by many who study or pursue paranormal sensory phenomena to describe individuals who are exceptionally likely to experience paranormal states of awareness.<br />
<br />
In many instances of contact with ghosts, a sensitive is the main medium between ghosts and lay people. Many media have used automatic writing or similar inscriptive techniques to record what they are told by a spirit, but the sensitive nonetheless occupies a central position in the reception of paranormal communication as well as its transmission in another, more commonly legible forms-- for instance, writing or speech. This model of paranormal communication could be described as direct transmission or single step communication between ghosts and their human media.<br />
<br />
Since at least 1860, however, spiritualists have also located ghostly content in mechanically produced media like photography (See [[Spirit Photography]] for more information). When locating spiritual content in a mechanically produced medium, the role of a human medium is fundamentally altered.<br />
<br />
The human medium that detects EVP in recorded sound, to apply Avital Ronnell's reading of technologically enabled spiritualism, is required to “take second place” (247), assuming the role of observer to the more frictionless transmission between spirits and a technical medium. The first step of this transmission occurs between a ghost and a machine, while the human interpretation thereof occurs afterward.<br />
<br />
The human medium's second position in EVP is a notable departure from one-step transmissions between ghosts and media that takes place in direct spirit-human communication. Lawrence Levan, for example, observed that a sensitive's “will must be passive” (36) if s/he is to enter a subjectivity conducive to receiving direct spiritual communication, abstaining from activity of the body and mind so as to facilitate transmission of spectral information. The type of 'passivity' required by direct spirit communication is distinct from that required in the act of repeatedly playing or manipulating a sound recording in search of EVP, however. EVP sensitives, while passive at some stages of locating and interpreting transmissions, must engage directly with various recording and playback technologies at others. <br />
<br />
The will-lessness of a sensitive in direct spiritual communication may, in certain ways, be one of the “pretechnological concepts” that Ronnell posits to be threatened with “unemployment” as it is replaced with newer, more technologically contemporary models. The technical expertise needed to produce, re-produce or find meaning in an EVP recording, for example, provides an alternative to the “high carelessness” (37) crucial in direct contact spiritualism, a passivity that allows information to be gathered without origin in a specific source or sense. The focus on one sense (hearing) and a very particular tool (recording/playback technology) is less will-less and careless than the unfocused sense needed to experience direct human-spirit contact. This shift requires a transition from unfocused reading of broad and diffuse sensory (and extra-sensory) application to the focused study of a technological 'lense' into the spirit realm. Thus un-focused perception is rendered 'unemployed' by the focused EVP-seeker.<br />
<br />
EVP does not only replace old models of spiritualist subjectivity, however, it also enables new ones. John J. Kucich, for example, identifies a diverse range of American Spiritualist traditions as simultaneously “universal and culturally specific” (153). Spiritualist practices are universal in their effect of rendering receiver and transmitter (either ghost or ghost-as-mediated-through-technology) “part in the great pattern and harmony which includes all unique events” (Levan 44), as evidence in the consistency to be found within a given cosmology, as evidence a particular model of life and afterlife's pervasiveness. The distinctness between various spiritualist techniques subsequently reveals distinction between various cosmologies.<br />
<br />
Whereas one-step spiritualism has historically 'empowered the disposessed subject' (Ronnell 249) that receives communication from ghosts through will-lessness, technical spiritualism and EVP replace the direct connection between spirit and life worlds with one that is mediated by technology. In effect, sound recordings are set up to make closer contact with the afterlife than their human listeners.<br />
<br />
==Replacing Human Media: Mechanically Mediating Spiritual Communication==<br />
<br />
Kucich asserts that spiritualist practices have significantly “mediated the power relations within and between cultures in the United States” (xiii), both empowering the dispossessed and also providing a popular target for discriminatory treatment of believers as “unlettered” and “provincial” (43). The use of recorded sound as a medium is a rebuttal of such critiques that mobilizes technical skill as a marker of media and technological literacy to remediate the classist conflict between spiritualism's believers and nonbelievers. By ascribing the power to contact spirits not to a human, but to a machine, the machine serves as a distancing tool, deflecting certain criticisms from the spiritualist to his or her machine. <br />
<br />
EVP, by mobilizing socially acceptable skill sets like consumer electronic prowess and the purchase of recordings, casts paranormal subjectivities as reasonable technological and consumer behavior. In listening to a recording for EVP, humans may still need to enter a will-less subjectivity or other paranormal state of consciousness, but these altered states are historically seen within Spiritualist circles as neither less or more valid than other more normative states (Kucich 42). Rather, spiritualists typically believe that the utility of entering a particular state of perception “depends on what you are trying to do” (ibid). In terms of protecting one's self from the discrimination typical leveled against direct spiritual communicators, receiving transmissions from the dead secondhand via recording technology is often deemed preferable.<br />
<br />
==Liminal Consciousnesses==<br />
<br />
Because of the requirement that technological spiritualists remain conscious enough to operate their equipment, locating EVP in a recording may be best accomplished while occupying some liminal state of consciousness between complete paranormal receptivity and that of normal listening practices.<br />
<br />
In entering a state of technological spiritualist consciousness, the EVP-seeker must observe a unity between the life and spirit worlds, locating its presence consistently in their sound technologies as well as in sound itself. <br />
<br />
==Commodifying the Uncanny: Hell Awaits==<br />
<br />
The sounds of EVP, existing in recorded format, are always available for circulation not only as spiritual information but also as commercial products. Consequently, the aesthetics of EVP are easily commodified, simulted, and sold as part of commercial recordings.<br />
<br />
Reversed voices, which sound quite similar to many instances of EVP, are one example of this commodifiable uncanniness. Heavy metal band Slayer, for example, deployed reversed voice recordings in their 1985 album “Hell Awaits”. The voices are recorded saying “Join Us”, then reversed in order to convey an unnatural control over time and sound. By using the aesthetic of earlier EVP recordings, Slayer reposition themselves as the controllers of uncanny sounds. The privileged unity between technology and spirits is appropriated, manipulated and desecrated. Slayer's ability to reproduce EVP-like sounds at will contextualizes EVP as 'unemployed', just another spooky audio trick. A listener in the liminal state of EVP-seeking consciousness might believe he or she is being beckoned by a chorus of dead souls, while the musicians would likely take mephistolean glee at the notion that they manipulated such a 'sensitive' listener.<br />
<br />
[[category:fall 2010]][[category:spiritualism]][[category:music]][[category:recording]][[category:recorded sound]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Electronic_Voice_Phenomena&diff=13350Electronic Voice Phenomena2010-12-11T22:19:18Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>This dossier is currently a work in progress. A completed version 1.0 will be available on Dec. 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
==Detecting Techno-Spiritual Unity==<br />
<br />
Electronic Voice Phenomena, as one facet in a diverse array of paranormal perceptions, exists within a centuries-old spiritualist traditions of contacting the dead, but uses recording technology alongside a 'sensitive' listener as media to interface with the dead. According to Lawrence Levan, the term 'sensitive' as a noun is used by many who study or pursue paranormal sensory phenomena to describe individuals who are exceptionally likely to experience paranormal states of awareness.<br />
<br />
In many instances of contact with ghosts, a sensitive is the main medium between ghosts and lay people. Many media have used automatic writing or similar inscriptive techniques to record what they are told by a spirit, but the sensitive nonetheless occupies a central position in the reception of paranormal communication as well as its transmission in another, more commonly legible forms-- for instance, writing or speech. This model of paranormal communication could be described as direct transmission or single step communication between ghosts and their human media.<br />
<br />
Since at least 1860, however, spiritualists have also located ghostly content in mechanically produced media like photography (See [[Spirit Photography]] for more information). When locating spiritual content in a mechanically produced medium, the role of a human medium is fundamentally altered.<br />
<br />
The human medium that detects EVP in recorded sound, to apply Avital Ronnell's reading of technologically enabled spiritualism, is required to “take second place” (247), assuming the role of observer to the more frictionless transmission between spirits and a technical medium. The first step of this transmission occurs between a ghost and a machine, while the human interpretation thereof occurs afterward.<br />
<br />
The human medium's second position in EVP is a notable departure from one-step transmissions between ghosts and media that takes place in direct spirit-human communication. Lawrence Levan, for example, observed that a sensitive's “will must be passive” (36) if s/he is to enter a subjectivity conducive to receiving direct spiritual communication, abstaining from activity of the body and mind so as to facilitate transmission of spectral information. The type of 'passivity' required by direct spirit communication is distinct from that required in the act of repeatedly playing or manipulating a sound recording in search of EVP, however. EVP sensitives, while passive at some stages of locating and interpreting transmissions, must engage directly with various recording and playback technologies at others. <br />
<br />
The will-lessness of a sensitive in direct spiritual communication may, in certain ways, be one of the “pretechnological concepts” that Ronnell posits to be threatened with “unemployment” as it is replaced with newer, more technologically contemporary models. The technical expertise needed to produce, re-produce or find meaning in an EVP recording, for example, provides an alternative to the “high carelessness” (37) crucial in direct contact spiritualism, a passivity that allows information to be gathered without origin in a specific source or sense. The focus on one sense (hearing) and a very particular tool (recording/playback technology) is less will-less and careless than the unfocused sense needed to experience direct human-spirit contact. This shift requires a transition from unfocused reading of broad and diffuse sensory (and extra-sensory) application to the focused study of a technological 'lense' into the spirit realm. Thus un-focused perception is rendered 'unemployed' by the focused EVP-seeker.<br />
<br />
EVP does not only replace old models of spiritualist subjectivity, however, it also enables new ones. John J. Kucich, for example, identifies a diverse range of American Spiritualist traditions as simultaneously “universal and culturally specific” (153). Spiritualist practices are universal in their effect of rendering receiver and transmitter (either ghost or ghost-as-mediated-through-technology) “part in the great pattern and harmony which includes all unique events” (Levan 44), as evidence in the consistency to be found within a given cosmology, as evidence a particular model of life and afterlife's pervasiveness. The distinctness between various spiritualist techniques subsequently reveals distinction between various cosmologies.<br />
<br />
Whereas one-step spiritualism has historically 'empowered the disposessed subject' (Ronnell 249) that receives communication from ghosts through will-lessness, technical spiritualism and EVP replace the direct connection between spirit and life worlds with one that is mediated by technology. In effect, sound recordings are set up to make closer contact with the afterlife than their human listeners.<br />
<br />
==Replacing Human Media: Mechanically Mediating Spiritual Communication==<br />
<br />
Kucich asserts that spiritualist practices have significantly “mediated the power relations within and between cultures in the United States” (xiii), both empowering the dispossessed and also providing a popular target for discriminatory treatment of believers as “unlettered” and “provincial” (43). The use of recorded sound as a medium is a rebuttal of such critiques that mobilizes technical skill as a marker of media and technological literacy to remediate the classist conflict between spiritualism's believers and nonbelievers. By ascribing the power to contact spirits not to a human, but to a machine, the machine serves as a distancing tool, deflecting certain criticisms from the spiritualist to his or her machine. <br />
<br />
EVP, by mobilizing socially acceptable skill sets like consumer electronic prowess and the purchase of recordings, casts paranormal subjectivities as reasonable technological and consumer behavior. In listening to a recording for EVP, humans may still need to enter a will-less subjectivity or other paranormal state of consciousness, but these altered states are historically seen within Spiritualist circles as neither less or more valid than other more normative states (Kucich 42). Rather, spiritualists typically believe that the utility of entering a particular state of perception “depends on what you are trying to do” (ibid). In terms of protecting one's self from the discrimination typical leveled against direct spiritual communicators, receiving transmissions from the dead secondhand via recording technology is often deemed preferable.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
==Liminal Consciousnesses==<br />
<br />
Because of the requirement that technological spiritualists remain conscious enough to operate their equipment, locating EVP in a recording may be best accomplished while occupying some liminal state of consciousness between complete paranormal receptivity and that of normal listening practices.<br />
<br />
In entering a state of technological spiritualist consciousness, the EVP-seeker must observe a unity between the life and spirit worlds, locating its presence consistently in their sound technologies as well as in sound itself. <br />
<br />
<br />
==Commodifying the Uncanny: Hell Awaits==<br />
<br />
The sounds of EVP, existing in recorded format, are always available for circulation not only as spiritual information but also as commercial products. Consequently, the aesthetics of EVP are easily commodified, simulted, and sold as part of commercial recordings.<br />
<br />
Reversed voices, which sound quite similar to many instances of EVP, are one example of this commodifiable uncanniness. Heavy metal band Slayer, for example, deployed reversed voice recordings in their 1985 album “Hell Awaits”. The voices are recorded saying “Join Us”, then reversed in order to convey an unnatural control over time and sound. By using the aesthetic of earlier EVP recordings, Slayer reposition themselves as the controllers of uncanny sounds. The privileged unity between technology and spirits is appropriated, manipulated and desecrated. Slayer's ability to reproduce EVP-like sounds at will contextualizes EVP as 'unemployed', just another spooky audio trick. A listener in the liminal state of EVP-seeking consciousness might believe he or she is being beckoned by a chorus of dead souls, while the musicians would likely take mephistolean glee at the notion that they manipulated such a 'sensitive' listener.<br />
<br />
[[category:fall 2010]][[category:spiritualism]][[category:music]][[category:recording]][[category:recorded sound]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Electronic_Voice_Phenomena&diff=13349Electronic Voice Phenomena2010-12-11T22:15:41Z<p>Jah450: /* DETECTING A TECHNOSPIRITUAL UNITY */</p>
<hr />
<div>///////////////THIS DOSSIER IS CURRENTLY A WORK IN PROGRESS. PLEASE CHECK BACK ON 12-13-2010 FOR A MORE COMPREHENSIVE TREATMENT OF THE TOPIC<br />
<br />
thanks =)<br />
<br />
==Detecting TechnoSpiritual Unity==<br />
<br />
Electronic Voice Phenomena, as one facet in a diverse array of paranormal perceptions, exists within a centuries-old spiritualist traditions of contacting the dead, but uses recording technology alongside a 'sensitive' listener as media to interface with the dead. According to Lawrence Levan, the term 'sensitive' as a noun is used by many who study or pursue paranormal sensory phenomena to describe individuals who are exceptionally likely to experience paranormal states of awareness.<br />
<br />
In many instances of contact with ghosts, a sensitive is the main medium between ghosts and lay people. Many media have used automatic writing or similar inscriptive techniques to record what they are told by a spirit, but the sensitive nonetheless occupies a central position in the reception of paranormal communication as well as its transmission in another, more commonly legible forms-- for instance, writing or speech. This model of paranormal communication could be described as direct transmission or single step communication between ghosts and their human media.<br />
<br />
Since at least 1860, however, spiritualists have also located ghostly content in mechanically produced media like photography (See [[Spirit Photography]] for more information). When locating spiritual content in a mechanically produced medium, the role of a human medium is fundamentally altered.<br />
<br />
The human medium that detects EVP in recorded sound, to apply Avital Ronnell's reading of technologically enabled spiritualism, is required to “take second place” (247), assuming the role of observer to the more frictionless transmission between spirits and a technical medium. The first step of this transmission occurs between a ghost and a machine, while the human interpretation thereof occurs afterward.<br />
<br />
The human medium's second position in EVP is a notable departure from one-step transmissions between ghosts and media that takes place in direct spirit-human communication. Lawrence Levan, for example, observed that a sensitive's “will must be passive” (36) if s/he is to enter a subjectivity conducive to receiving direct spiritual communication, abstaining from activity of the body and mind so as to facilitate transmission of spectral information. The type of 'passivity' required by direct spirit communication is distinct from that required in the act of repeatedly playing or manipulating a sound recording in search of EVP, however. EVP sensitives, while passive at some stages of locating and interpreting transmissions, must engage directly with various recording and playback technologies at others. <br />
<br />
The will-lessness of a sensitive in direct spiritual communication may, in certain ways, be one of the “pretechnological concepts” that Ronnell posits to be threatened with “unemployment” as it is replaced with newer, more technologically contemporary models. The technical expertise needed to produce, re-produce or find meaning in an EVP recording, for example, provides an alternative to the “high carelessness” (37) crucial in direct contact spiritualism, a passivity that allows information to be gathered without origin in a specific source or sense. The focus on one sense (hearing) and a very particular tool (recording/playback technology) is less will-less and careless than the unfocused sense needed to experience direct human-spirit contact. This shift requires a transition from unfocused reading of broad and diffuse sensory (and extra-sensory) application to the focused study of a technological 'lense' into the spirit realm. Thus un-focused perception is rendered 'unemployed' by the focused EVP-seeker.<br />
<br />
EVP does not only replace old models of spiritualist subjectivity, however, it also enables new ones. John J. Kucich, for example, identifies a diverse range of American Spiritualist traditions as simultaneously “universal and culturally specific” (153). Spiritualist practices are universal in their effect of rendering receiver and transmitter (either ghost or ghost-as-mediated-through-technology) “part in the great pattern and harmony which includes all unique events” (Levan 44), as evidence in the consistency to be found within a given cosmology, as evidence a particular model of life and afterlife's pervasiveness. The distinctness between various spiritualist techniques subsequently reveals distinction between various cosmologies.<br />
<br />
Whereas one-step spiritualism has historically 'empowered the disposessed subject' (Ronnell 249) that receives communication from ghosts through will-lessness, technical spiritualism and EVP replace the direct connection between spirit and life worlds with one that is mediated by technology. In effect, sound recordings are set up to make closer contact with the afterlife than their human listeners.<br />
<br />
==REPLACING HUMAN MEDIA: MEDIATING THE SPIRIT REALM==<br />
<br />
Kucich asserts that spiritualist practices have significantly “mediated the power relations within and between cultures in the United States” (xiii), both empowering the dispossessed and also providing a popular target for discriminatory treatment of believers as “unlettered” and “provincial” (43). The use of recorded sound as a medium is a rebuttal of such critiques that mobilizes technical skill as a marker of media and technological literacy to remediate the classist conflict between spiritualism's believers and nonbelievers. By ascribing the power to contact spirits not to a human, but to a machine, the machine serves as a distancing tool, deflecting certain criticisms from the spiritualist to his or her machine. <br />
<br />
EVP, by mobilizing socially acceptable skill sets like consumer electronic prowess and the purchase of recordings, casts paranormal subjectivities as reasonable technological and consumer behavior. In listening to a recording for EVP, humans may still need to enter a will-less subjectivity or other paranormal state of consciousness, but these altered states are historically seen within Spiritualist circles as neither less or more valid than other more normative states (Kucich 42). Rather, spiritualists typically believe that the utility of entering a particular state of perception “depends on what you are trying to do” (ibid). In terms of protecting one's self from the discrimination typical leveled against direct spiritual communicators, receiving transmissions from the dead secondhand via recording technology is often deemed preferable.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
==LIMINAL CONSCIOUSNESSES==<br />
<br />
Because of the requirement that technological spiritualists remain conscious enough to operate their equipment, locating EVP in a recording may be best accomplished while occupying some liminal state of consciousness between complete paranormal receptivity and that of normal listening practices.<br />
<br />
In entering a state of technological spiritualist consciousness, the EVP-seeker must observe a unity between the life and spirit worlds, locating its presence consistently in their sound technologies as well as in sound itself. <br />
<br />
<br />
==COMMODIFYING THE UNCANNY: HELL AWAITS==<br />
<br />
The sounds of EVP, existing in recorded format, are always available for circulation not only as spiritual information but also as commercial products. Consequently, the aesthetics of EVP are easily commodified, simulted, and sold as part of commercial recordings.<br />
<br />
Reversed voices, which sound quite similar to many instances of EVP, are one example of this commodifiable uncanniness. Heavy metal band Slayer, for example, deployed reversed voice recordings in their 1985 album “Hell Awaits”. The voices are recorded saying “Join Us”, then reversed in order to convey an unnatural control over time and sound. By using the aesthetic of earlier EVP recordings, Slayer reposition themselves as the controllers of uncanny sounds. The privileged unity between technology and spirits is appropriated, manipulated and desecrated. Slayer's ability to reproduce EVP-like sounds at will contextualizes EVP as 'unemployed', just another spooky audio trick. A listener in the liminal state of EVP-seeking consciousness might believe he or she is being beckoned by a chorus of dead souls, while the musicians would likely take mephistolean glee at the notion that they manipulated such a 'sensitive' listener.<br />
<br />
[[category:fall 2010]][[category:spiritualism]][[category:music]][[category:recording]][[category:recorded sound]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Spirit_Photography&diff=13348Spirit Photography2010-12-11T22:13:59Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>"Spirit Photography" refers to the use of photographic technology, with or without the use of a camera, to document the existence of the supernatural. <br />
[[image: asghsdf.jpg|thumb|right|400px|Welcome, spirits.]]<br />
<br />
==Beginnings==<br />
<br />
===Photography=== <br />
Modern photography traces its lineage to the January 7, 1839 announcement of the French Academy of Sciences that Louis Daguerre had perfected a new means of documenting reality through the use of silver coated plates made light sensitive by exposure to iodine vapors and developed with the fumes of heated mercury. The process immediately garnered widespread popularity (Coe 16-17). Throughout the United States and Europe, the new, seemingly magical medium was credited with unprecedented powers “…by the close of the century a photograph was regarded not just as a substitute for but as superior to unaided human vision” (Green-Lewis 231).<br />
<br />
===Spiritualism===<br />
The American Spiritualist Movement, known commonly as Spiritualism is generally believed to have originated in 1848 when Kate and Margaret Fox of Hydesville, New York claimed the ability to communicate with the dead. The sisters gained widespread notoriety through the dissemination of pamphlets detailing their experiences and demonstrations of their communication with spirits from the afterlife (Brandon 4). Likely owing its popularity to pervasive grief from recent Civil War casualties, Spiritualism, or the belief that spirits of the dead residing in the afterlife can be contacted by human “mediums” became a fairly common belief in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America and later spread to Europe. By 1854 “fifteen thousand people signed a petition introduced by Illinois senator James Shields to the United States Congress, urging an official investigation of the new spiritual sensation” (McGarry 2). At the peak of its popularity Spiritualism may have had as many as eight million followers. <br />
<br />
===First Spirit Photographs===<br />
A lack of scientific understanding meant that the camera was often instilled with the mystic power of “seeing past material surfaces into a world of spirit” (Green-Lewis 228) even before the first formal spirit photograph was made known. Accounts from the 1850s describe the appearance of inexplicable transparent images on photographs purportedly representing the dead: however it was not until 1861 that the first official spirit photograph was made (Cheroux 15). An American, William H. Mumler, apparently took the first spirit photograph one day in his Boston studio while experimenting with self-portraiture. Mumler claimed that a translucent figure had magically appeared on the photographic plate beside his own figure and that the image resembled that of his cousin who had died thirteen years earlier (Jolly 16). Mumler’s first photograph appeared in numerous Spiritualist journals and he was soon charging the exorbitant rate of $10 for three cartes des visites at his studio in New York. His work was followed by that of Frederick Hudson in England and Edouard Buguet in France in the 1870s (Cheroux 20). <br />
<br />
[[image: ghosts2.jpg|thumb|right|150px|Early work of Frederick Hudson]]<br />
<br />
==Types==<br />
While the earliest and most popular spirit photographs combined portrait sitters with ghost images, spirit photography during its peak period (1860s-1920s) can be divided into three categories. <br />
<br />
===Photographs of Spirits===<br />
The first type of spirit photography sought to capture visual images of ghosts and spirits, usually alongside living subjects. In many cases, photographers attempted to “conjure” up images of the sitter’s deceased relatives in an attempt to communicate with the dead. Their creation was mainly profit driven as photographers charged large sums for “conjuring” sessions in their studios. The most famous of these is an early 1870s William Mumler photograph of a seated Mary Todd Lincoln with the hands of her dead husband resting on her shoulders. <br />
<br />
The Cottingely Fairies series also belongs to this category. Cousins in Cottingley, England, 16-year-old Elsie Wright and 10-year-old Frances Griffiths took the photographs of themselves in a field with dancing fairies. Subsequently, some of the photographs were published in the Christmas 1920 issue of The Strand magazine accompanied by an article written by Sherlock Holmes author and spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about the true existence of fairies. Public reactions were mixed, but many believed the veracity of the photographs and Doyle’s claims at the time of publication (Green-Lewis 231).<br />
<br />
===Photographs of Vital Forces===<br />
[[image: hhhhhhhhh.jpg|thumb|left|200px|The first X-rays.]]<br />
During the last decades of the 19th century, photographs of “vital forces” became widely popular. Vital forces include anything from emotions and thoughts to “fluids emanating from a medium. This type of photography elicited the most heated public debate as it pitted spiritualists who believed that phenomena from beyond appeared to the medium against animists who believed the mediums themselves were responsible for supernatural phenomena (Cheroux 16). The driving force for many people who attempted to measure and document a “vital force” was the belief that there was a way to objectively measure and document the emission of bodily radiation. This could take the form of thoughts, emotions, or any amorphous universal fluid. These photographs coincide with the early X-rays taken by Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen. <br />
<br />
===Photographs of Mediums/Ectoplasm===<br />
[[image: ectoplasm.jpg|thumb|right|150px|Typical ectoplasm.]]<br />
Like photography of “vital forces” images of mediums themselves vary widely. Many photographs attempted to capture mediums at work with the spirits. From this category emerge a few major clusters. The first is photography of séances, which can simply document the setting and people present in attempts to contact the dead, but also depict levitation tables and ghostly clouds hovering over occult gatherings. The second type resemble normal photographs of spirits, but depict well known mediums like Ada Deane and Florence Cook with spirits or “spirit guides.” The last major type of these images displays female mediums with a white, mesh-like substance emanating from their nose, mouth, breast or genital region. This substance was referred to as “ectoplasm” and thought of as a sort of spirit matter or “life force” (Jolly 70). Ectoplasm photographs peaked in popularity after World War I and concentrate on documenting a spirit’s “physical impact on the body of a female psychic” (Schonover 30).<br />
<br />
==Trials/Disproval==<br />
[[image: harpfull.jpg|thumb|right|300px|Harper's Weekly Spirit Photographs]]<br />
William Mumler was brought to trial in New York City against charges of fraud in 1869. The trial judge was convinced that Mumler’s photographs must have been the product of some trickery or deception, but was compelled to release Mumler due to lack of evidence (Jolly 14). Numerous professionals testified to the fact that Mumler could have photographically produced the spirits in his photographs in nine different ways, the most likely being a simple double exposure of the photographic plate. However, the prosecution eventually decided to attack the validity of spiritualist beliefs and their case fell apart. In 1875, the French spirit photographer Edouard Buguet was tried for fraud and immediately admitted that all his photographs had indeed been double exposures. Mumler himself admitted the same some years later (Jolly 16). <br />
Eventually most spirit photographs from their heyday were admitted to be fakes. The fairies in Cottingley were actually cardboard cutouts, ectoplasm was just white cotton muslin, and the ghosts that appeared in hundreds, if not thousands of photographs were only double exposures or chemical smudges. A lack of understanding of the recently invented photographic process along with a widespread belief in spiritualism meant that many had been easily fooled from the 1860s through the 1920s. <br />
<br />
==1920s-Today==<br />
[[image: serios1.jpg|thumb|left|300px|Thoughtography]]<br />
Far from having disappeared, spirit photography and similar practices have persisted throughout the 20th century. In the 1940s Russian Semyon Kirlian developed Kirlian photography believing he could capture the “auras” of living things through the use of film and an electrical current. Modern aura photography captures body heat and analyzes which colors appear around human subjects. In the 1960s American Ted Serios from Chicago apparently produced a number of photographs using “thoughtography” whereby he “thought” images onto Polaroid film while in another room (Cheroux 167). Originally gaining popularity in the 1950s and 60s, Electronic Voice Phenomena is the practice of picking up possibly paranormal communications in the white noise of recordings, an idea of trans-communication that has also been attempted with television and the Internet. Snapshots and videos throughout the world are often rumored to contain background ghosts, particularly in contemporary Japan (Chalfen 52). Modern spiritualists also practice automatic painting, a practice whereby a medium paints an image while supposedly possessed by a spirit from the afterlife.<br />
<br />
=Works Cited=<br />
<br />
Brandon, Ruth The Spiritualists New York: Knopf, 1983.<br />
<br />
Chalfen, Richard “Shinrei Shashin: Photographs of Ghosts in Japanese Snapshots” Photography and Culture 1:1 (2008): 51-71.<br />
<br />
Chéroux, Clément The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, 2005.<br />
<br />
Coe, Brian The Birth of Photography: The Story of the Formative Years 1800-1900 New York: Taplinger, 1977.<br />
<br />
Green-Lewis, Jennifer Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.<br />
<br />
Jolly, Martyn Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography The British Library: London, 2006.<br />
<br />
McGarry, Molly Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth Century America UC California Press: Berkeley, 2008.<br />
<br />
Schonover, Karl “Ectoplasms, Evanescence, and Photography” Art Journal 62:3 (2003): 30-43.<br />
<br />
[[Category:Dossier]][[category:Spiritualism]][[category:photography]][[category:visuality]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Electronic_Voice_Phenomena&diff=13347Electronic Voice Phenomena2010-12-11T22:12:37Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>///////////////THIS DOSSIER IS CURRENTLY A WORK IN PROGRESS. PLEASE CHECK BACK ON 12-13-2010 FOR A MORE COMPREHENSIVE TREATMENT OF THE TOPIC<br />
<br />
thanks =)<br />
<br />
==DETECTING A TECHNOSPIRITUAL UNITY==<br />
<br />
Electronic Voice Phenomena, as one facet in a diverse array of paranormal perceptions, exists within a centuries-old spiritualist traditions of contacting the dead, but uses recording technology alongside a 'sensitive' listener as media to interface with the dead. According to Lawrence Levan, the term 'sensitive' as a noun is used by many who study or pursue paranormal sensory phenomena to describe individuals who are exceptionally likely to experience paranormal states of awareness.<br />
<br />
In many instances of contact with ghosts, a sensitive is the main medium between ghosts and lay people. Many media have used automatic writing or similar inscriptive techniques to record what they are told by a spirit, but the sensitive nonetheless occupies a central position in the reception of paranormal communication as well as its transmission in another, more commonly legible forms-- for instance, writing or speech. This model of paranormal communication could be described as direct transmission or single step communication between ghosts and their human media.<br />
<br />
Since at least 1860, however, spiritualists have also located ghostly content in mechanically produced media like photography (See [[Spirit Photography]] for more information). When locating spiritual content in a mechanically produced medium, the role of a human medium is fundamentally altered.<br />
<br />
The human medium that detects EVP in recorded sound, to apply Avital Ronnell's reading of technologically enabled spiritualism, is required to “take second place” (247), assuming the role of observer to the more frictionless transmission between spirits and a technical medium. The first step of this transmission occurs between a ghost and a machine, while the human interpretation thereof occurs afterward.<br />
<br />
The human medium's second position in EVP is a notable departure from one-step transmissions between ghosts and media that takes place in direct spirit-human communication. Lawrence Levan, for example, observed that a sensitive's “will must be passive” (36) if s/he is to enter a subjectivity conducive to receiving direct spiritual communication, abstaining from activity of the body and mind so as to facilitate transmission of spectral information. The type of 'passivity' required by direct spirit communication is distinct from that required in the act of repeatedly playing or manipulating a sound recording in search of EVP, however. EVP sensitives, while passive at some stages of locating and interpreting transmissions, must engage directly with various recording and playback technologies at others. <br />
<br />
The will-lessness of a sensitive in direct spiritual communication may, in certain ways, be one of the “pretechnological concepts” that Ronnell posits to be threatened with “unemployment” as it is replaced with newer, more technologically contemporary models. The technical expertise needed to produce, re-produce or find meaning in an EVP recording, for example, provides an alternative to the “high carelessness” (37) crucial in direct contact spiritualism, a passivity that allows information to be gathered without origin in a specific source or sense. The focus on one sense (hearing) and a very particular tool (recording/playback technology) is less will-less and careless than the unfocused sense needed to experience direct human-spirit contact. This shift requires a transition from unfocused reading of broad and diffuse sensory (and extra-sensory) application to the focused study of a technological 'lense' into the spirit realm. Thus un-focused perception is rendered 'unemployed' by the focused EVP-seeker.<br />
<br />
EVP does not only replace old models of spiritualist subjectivity, however, it also enables new ones. John J. Kucich, for example, identifies a diverse range of American Spiritualist traditions as simultaneously “universal and culturally specific” (153). Spiritualist practices are universal in their effect of rendering receiver and transmitter (either ghost or ghost-as-mediated-through-technology) “part in the great pattern and harmony which includes all unique events” (Levan 44), as evidence in the consistency to be found within a given cosmology, as evidence a particular model of life and afterlife's pervasiveness. The distinctness between various spiritualist techniques subsequently reveals distinction between various cosmologies.<br />
<br />
Whereas one-step spiritualism has historically 'empowered the disposessed subject' (Ronnell 249) that receives communication from ghosts through will-lessness, technical spiritualism and EVP replace the direct connection between spirit and life worlds with one that is mediated by technology. In effect, sound recordings are set up to make closer contact with the afterlife than their human listeners.<br />
<br />
<br />
==REPLACING HUMAN MEDIA: MEDIATING THE SPIRIT REALM==<br />
<br />
Kucich asserts that spiritualist practices have significantly “mediated the power relations within and between cultures in the United States” (xiii), both empowering the dispossessed and also providing a popular target for discriminatory treatment of believers as “unlettered” and “provincial” (43). The use of recorded sound as a medium is a rebuttal of such critiques that mobilizes technical skill as a marker of media and technological literacy to remediate the classist conflict between spiritualism's believers and nonbelievers. By ascribing the power to contact spirits not to a human, but to a machine, the machine serves as a distancing tool, deflecting certain criticisms from the spiritualist to his or her machine. <br />
<br />
EVP, by mobilizing socially acceptable skill sets like consumer electronic prowess and the purchase of recordings, casts paranormal subjectivities as reasonable technological and consumer behavior. In listening to a recording for EVP, humans may still need to enter a will-less subjectivity or other paranormal state of consciousness, but these altered states are historically seen within Spiritualist circles as neither less or more valid than other more normative states (Kucich 42). Rather, spiritualists typically believe that the utility of entering a particular state of perception “depends on what you are trying to do” (ibid). In terms of protecting one's self from the discrimination typical leveled against direct spiritual communicators, receiving transmissions from the dead secondhand via recording technology is often deemed preferable.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
==LIMINAL CONSCIOUSNESSES==<br />
<br />
Because of the requirement that technological spiritualists remain conscious enough to operate their equipment, locating EVP in a recording may be best accomplished while occupying some liminal state of consciousness between complete paranormal receptivity and that of normal listening practices.<br />
<br />
In entering a state of technological spiritualist consciousness, the EVP-seeker must observe a unity between the life and spirit worlds, locating its presence consistently in their sound technologies as well as in sound itself. <br />
<br />
<br />
==COMMODIFYING THE UNCANNY: HELL AWAITS==<br />
<br />
The sounds of EVP, existing in recorded format, are always available for circulation not only as spiritual information but also as commercial products. Consequently, the aesthetics of EVP are easily commodified, simulted, and sold as part of commercial recordings.<br />
<br />
Reversed voices, which sound quite similar to many instances of EVP, are one example of this commodifiable uncanniness. Heavy metal band Slayer, for example, deployed reversed voice recordings in their 1985 album “Hell Awaits”. The voices are recorded saying “Join Us”, then reversed in order to convey an unnatural control over time and sound. By using the aesthetic of earlier EVP recordings, Slayer reposition themselves as the controllers of uncanny sounds. The privileged unity between technology and spirits is appropriated, manipulated and desecrated. Slayer's ability to reproduce EVP-like sounds at will contextualizes EVP as 'unemployed', just another spooky audio trick. A listener in the liminal state of EVP-seeking consciousness might believe he or she is being beckoned by a chorus of dead souls, while the musicians would likely take mephistolean glee at the notion that they manipulated such a 'sensitive' listener.<br />
<br />
[[category:fall 2010]][[category:spiritualism]][[category:music]][[category:recording]][[category:recorded sound]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Electronic_Voice_Phenomena&diff=13346Electronic Voice Phenomena2010-12-11T22:10:02Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>///////////////THIS DOSSIER IS CURRENTLY A WORK IN PROGRESS. PLEASE CHECK BACK ON 12-13-2010 FOR A MORE COMPREHENSIVE TREATMENT OF THE TOPIC<br />
<br />
thanks =)<br />
<br />
==DETECTING A TECHNOSPIRITUAL UNITY==<br />
<br />
Electronic Voice Phenomena, as one facet in a diverse array of paranormal perceptions, exists within a centuries-old spiritualist traditions of contacting the dead, but uses recording technology alongside a 'sensitive' listener as media to interface with the dead. According to Lawrence Levan, the term 'sensitive' as a noun is used by many who study or pursue paranormal sensory phenomena to describe individuals who are exceptionally likely to experience paranormal states of awareness.<br />
<br />
In many instances of contact with ghosts, a sensitive is the main medium between ghosts and lay people. Many media have used automatic writing or similar inscriptive techniques to record what they are told by a spirit, but the sensitive nonetheless occupies a central position in the reception of paranormal communication as well as its transmission in another, more commonly legible forms-- for instance, writing or speech. This model of paranormal communication could be described as direct transmission or single step communication between ghosts and their human media.<br />
<br />
Since at least 1860, however, spiritualists have also located ghostly content in mechanically produced media like photography (See Spirit Photography for more information). When locating spiritual content in a mechanically produced medium, the role of a human medium is fundamentally altered.<br />
<br />
The human medium that detects EVP in recorded sound, to apply Avital Ronnell's reading of technologically enabled spiritualism, is required to “take second place” (247), assuming the role of observer to the more frictionless transmission between spirits and a technical medium. The first step of this transmission occurs between a ghost and a machine, while the human interpretation thereof occurs afterward.<br />
<br />
The human medium's second position in EVP is a notable departure from one-step transmissions between ghosts and media that takes place in direct spirit-human communication. Lawrence Levan, for example, observed that a sensitive's “will must be passive” (36) if s/he is to enter a subjectivity conducive to receiving direct spiritual communication, abstaining from activity of the body and mind so as to facilitate transmission of spectral information. The type of 'passivity' required by direct spirit communication is distinct from that required in the act of repeatedly playing or manipulating a sound recording in search of EVP, however. EVP sensitives, while passive at some stages of locating and interpreting transmissions, must engage directly with various recording and playback technologies at others. <br />
<br />
The will-lessness of a sensitive in direct spiritual communication may, in certain ways, be one of the “pretechnological concepts” that Ronnell posits to be threatened with “unemployment” as it is replaced with newer, more technologically contemporary models. The technical expertise needed to produce, re-produce or find meaning in an EVP recording, for example, provides an alternative to the “high carelessness” (37) crucial in direct contact spiritualism, a passivity that allows information to be gathered without origin in a specific source or sense. The focus on one sense (hearing) and a very particular tool (recording/playback technology) is less will-less and careless than the unfocused sense needed to experience direct human-spirit contact. This shift requires a transition from unfocused reading of broad and diffuse sensory (and extra-sensory) application to the focused study of a technological 'lense' into the spirit realm. Thus un-focused perception is rendered 'unemployed' by the focused EVP-seeker.<br />
<br />
EVP does not only replace old models of spiritualist subjectivity, however, it also enables new ones. John J. Kucich, for example, identifies a diverse range of American Spiritualist traditions as simultaneously “universal and culturally specific” (153). Spiritualist practices are universal in their effect of rendering receiver and transmitter (either ghost or ghost-as-mediated-through-technology) “part in the great pattern and harmony which includes all unique events” (Levan 44), as evidence in the consistency to be found within a given cosmology, as evidence a particular model of life and afterlife's pervasiveness. The distinctness between various spiritualist techniques subsequently reveals distinction between various cosmologies.<br />
<br />
Whereas one-step spiritualism has historically 'empowered the disposessed subject' (Ronnell 249) that receives communication from ghosts through will-lessness, technical spiritualism and EVP replace the direct connection between spirit and life worlds with one that is mediated by technology. In effect, sound recordings are set up to make closer contact with the afterlife than their human listeners.<br />
<br />
<br />
==REPLACING HUMAN MEDIA: MEDIATING THE SPIRIT REALM==<br />
<br />
Kucich asserts that spiritualist practices have significantly “mediated the power relations within and between cultures in the United States” (xiii), both empowering the dispossessed and also providing a popular target for discriminatory treatment of believers as “unlettered” and “provincial” (43). The use of recorded sound as a medium is a rebuttal of such critiques that mobilizes technical skill as a marker of media and technological literacy to remediate the classist conflict between spiritualism's believers and nonbelievers. By ascribing the power to contact spirits not to a human, but to a machine, the machine serves as a distancing tool, deflecting certain criticisms from the spiritualist to his or her machine. <br />
<br />
EVP, by mobilizing socially acceptable skill sets like consumer electronic prowess and the purchase of recordings, casts paranormal subjectivities as reasonable technological and consumer behavior. In listening to a recording for EVP, humans may still need to enter a will-less subjectivity or other paranormal state of consciousness, but these altered states are historically seen within Spiritualist circles as neither less or more valid than other more normative states (Kucich 42). Rather, spiritualists typically believe that the utility of entering a particular state of perception “depends on what you are trying to do” (ibid). In terms of protecting one's self from the discrimination typical leveled against direct spiritual communicators, receiving transmissions from the dead secondhand via recording technology is often deemed preferable.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
==LIMINAL CONSCIOUSNESSES==<br />
<br />
Because of the requirement that technological spiritualists remain conscious enough to operate their equipment, locating EVP in a recording may be best accomplished while occupying some liminal state of consciousness between complete paranormal receptivity and that of normal listening practices.<br />
<br />
In entering a state of technological spiritualist consciousness, the EVP-seeker must observe a unity between the life and spirit worlds, locating its presence consistently in their sound technologies as well as in sound itself. <br />
<br />
<br />
==COMMODIFYING THE UNCANNY: HELL AWAITS==<br />
<br />
The sounds of EVP, existing in recorded format, are always available for circulation not only as spiritual information but also as commercial products. Consequently, the aesthetics of EVP are easily commodified, simulted, and sold as part of commercial recordings.<br />
<br />
Reversed voices, which sound quite similar to many instances of EVP, are one example of this commodifiable uncanniness. Heavy metal band Slayer, for example, deployed reversed voice recordings in their 1985 album “Hell Awaits”. The voices are recorded saying “Join Us”, then reversed in order to convey an unnatural control over time and sound. By using the aesthetic of earlier EVP recordings, Slayer reposition themselves as the controllers of uncanny sounds. The privileged unity between technology and spirits is appropriated, manipulated and desecrated. Slayer's ability to reproduce EVP-like sounds at will contextualizes EVP as 'unemployed', just another spooky audio trick. A listener in the liminal state of EVP-seeking consciousness might believe he or she is being beckoned by a chorus of dead souls, while the musicians would likely take mephistolean glee at the notion that they manipulated such a 'sensitive' listener.</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Electronic_Voice_Phenomena&diff=13345Electronic Voice Phenomena2010-12-11T22:09:52Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>///////////////THIS DOSSIER IS CURRENTLY A WORK IN PROGRESS. PLEASE CHECK BACK ON 12-13-2010 FOR A MORE COMPREHENSIVE TREATMENT OF THE TOPIC<br />
thanks =)<br />
<br />
==DETECTING A TECHNOSPIRITUAL UNITY==<br />
<br />
Electronic Voice Phenomena, as one facet in a diverse array of paranormal perceptions, exists within a centuries-old spiritualist traditions of contacting the dead, but uses recording technology alongside a 'sensitive' listener as media to interface with the dead. According to Lawrence Levan, the term 'sensitive' as a noun is used by many who study or pursue paranormal sensory phenomena to describe individuals who are exceptionally likely to experience paranormal states of awareness.<br />
<br />
In many instances of contact with ghosts, a sensitive is the main medium between ghosts and lay people. Many media have used automatic writing or similar inscriptive techniques to record what they are told by a spirit, but the sensitive nonetheless occupies a central position in the reception of paranormal communication as well as its transmission in another, more commonly legible forms-- for instance, writing or speech. This model of paranormal communication could be described as direct transmission or single step communication between ghosts and their human media.<br />
<br />
Since at least 1860, however, spiritualists have also located ghostly content in mechanically produced media like photography (See Spirit Photography for more information). When locating spiritual content in a mechanically produced medium, the role of a human medium is fundamentally altered.<br />
<br />
The human medium that detects EVP in recorded sound, to apply Avital Ronnell's reading of technologically enabled spiritualism, is required to “take second place” (247), assuming the role of observer to the more frictionless transmission between spirits and a technical medium. The first step of this transmission occurs between a ghost and a machine, while the human interpretation thereof occurs afterward.<br />
<br />
The human medium's second position in EVP is a notable departure from one-step transmissions between ghosts and media that takes place in direct spirit-human communication. Lawrence Levan, for example, observed that a sensitive's “will must be passive” (36) if s/he is to enter a subjectivity conducive to receiving direct spiritual communication, abstaining from activity of the body and mind so as to facilitate transmission of spectral information. The type of 'passivity' required by direct spirit communication is distinct from that required in the act of repeatedly playing or manipulating a sound recording in search of EVP, however. EVP sensitives, while passive at some stages of locating and interpreting transmissions, must engage directly with various recording and playback technologies at others. <br />
<br />
The will-lessness of a sensitive in direct spiritual communication may, in certain ways, be one of the “pretechnological concepts” that Ronnell posits to be threatened with “unemployment” as it is replaced with newer, more technologically contemporary models. The technical expertise needed to produce, re-produce or find meaning in an EVP recording, for example, provides an alternative to the “high carelessness” (37) crucial in direct contact spiritualism, a passivity that allows information to be gathered without origin in a specific source or sense. The focus on one sense (hearing) and a very particular tool (recording/playback technology) is less will-less and careless than the unfocused sense needed to experience direct human-spirit contact. This shift requires a transition from unfocused reading of broad and diffuse sensory (and extra-sensory) application to the focused study of a technological 'lense' into the spirit realm. Thus un-focused perception is rendered 'unemployed' by the focused EVP-seeker.<br />
<br />
EVP does not only replace old models of spiritualist subjectivity, however, it also enables new ones. John J. Kucich, for example, identifies a diverse range of American Spiritualist traditions as simultaneously “universal and culturally specific” (153). Spiritualist practices are universal in their effect of rendering receiver and transmitter (either ghost or ghost-as-mediated-through-technology) “part in the great pattern and harmony which includes all unique events” (Levan 44), as evidence in the consistency to be found within a given cosmology, as evidence a particular model of life and afterlife's pervasiveness. The distinctness between various spiritualist techniques subsequently reveals distinction between various cosmologies.<br />
<br />
Whereas one-step spiritualism has historically 'empowered the disposessed subject' (Ronnell 249) that receives communication from ghosts through will-lessness, technical spiritualism and EVP replace the direct connection between spirit and life worlds with one that is mediated by technology. In effect, sound recordings are set up to make closer contact with the afterlife than their human listeners.<br />
<br />
<br />
==REPLACING HUMAN MEDIA: MEDIATING THE SPIRIT REALM==<br />
<br />
Kucich asserts that spiritualist practices have significantly “mediated the power relations within and between cultures in the United States” (xiii), both empowering the dispossessed and also providing a popular target for discriminatory treatment of believers as “unlettered” and “provincial” (43). The use of recorded sound as a medium is a rebuttal of such critiques that mobilizes technical skill as a marker of media and technological literacy to remediate the classist conflict between spiritualism's believers and nonbelievers. By ascribing the power to contact spirits not to a human, but to a machine, the machine serves as a distancing tool, deflecting certain criticisms from the spiritualist to his or her machine. <br />
<br />
EVP, by mobilizing socially acceptable skill sets like consumer electronic prowess and the purchase of recordings, casts paranormal subjectivities as reasonable technological and consumer behavior. In listening to a recording for EVP, humans may still need to enter a will-less subjectivity or other paranormal state of consciousness, but these altered states are historically seen within Spiritualist circles as neither less or more valid than other more normative states (Kucich 42). Rather, spiritualists typically believe that the utility of entering a particular state of perception “depends on what you are trying to do” (ibid). In terms of protecting one's self from the discrimination typical leveled against direct spiritual communicators, receiving transmissions from the dead secondhand via recording technology is often deemed preferable.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
==LIMINAL CONSCIOUSNESSES==<br />
<br />
Because of the requirement that technological spiritualists remain conscious enough to operate their equipment, locating EVP in a recording may be best accomplished while occupying some liminal state of consciousness between complete paranormal receptivity and that of normal listening practices.<br />
<br />
In entering a state of technological spiritualist consciousness, the EVP-seeker must observe a unity between the life and spirit worlds, locating its presence consistently in their sound technologies as well as in sound itself. <br />
<br />
<br />
==COMMODIFYING THE UNCANNY: HELL AWAITS==<br />
<br />
The sounds of EVP, existing in recorded format, are always available for circulation not only as spiritual information but also as commercial products. Consequently, the aesthetics of EVP are easily commodified, simulted, and sold as part of commercial recordings.<br />
<br />
Reversed voices, which sound quite similar to many instances of EVP, are one example of this commodifiable uncanniness. Heavy metal band Slayer, for example, deployed reversed voice recordings in their 1985 album “Hell Awaits”. The voices are recorded saying “Join Us”, then reversed in order to convey an unnatural control over time and sound. By using the aesthetic of earlier EVP recordings, Slayer reposition themselves as the controllers of uncanny sounds. The privileged unity between technology and spirits is appropriated, manipulated and desecrated. Slayer's ability to reproduce EVP-like sounds at will contextualizes EVP as 'unemployed', just another spooky audio trick. A listener in the liminal state of EVP-seeking consciousness might believe he or she is being beckoned by a chorus of dead souls, while the musicians would likely take mephistolean glee at the notion that they manipulated such a 'sensitive' listener.</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Electronic_Voice_Phenomena&diff=13344Electronic Voice Phenomena2010-12-11T22:09:24Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>///////////////THIS DOSSIER IS CURRENTLY A WORK IN PROGRESS. PLEASE CHECK BACK ON 12-13-2010 FOR A MORE COMPREHENSIVE TREATMENT OF THE TOPIC<br />
<br />
==DETECTING A TECHNOSPIRITUAL UNITY==<br />
<br />
Electronic Voice Phenomena, as one facet in a diverse array of paranormal perceptions, exists within a centuries-old spiritualist traditions of contacting the dead, but uses recording technology alongside a 'sensitive' listener as media to interface with the dead. According to Lawrence Levan, the term 'sensitive' as a noun is used by many who study or pursue paranormal sensory phenomena to describe individuals who are exceptionally likely to experience paranormal states of awareness.<br />
<br />
In many instances of contact with ghosts, a sensitive is the main medium between ghosts and lay people. Many media have used automatic writing or similar inscriptive techniques to record what they are told by a spirit, but the sensitive nonetheless occupies a central position in the reception of paranormal communication as well as its transmission in another, more commonly legible forms-- for instance, writing or speech. This model of paranormal communication could be described as direct transmission or single step communication between ghosts and their human media.<br />
<br />
Since at least 1860, however, spiritualists have also located ghostly content in mechanically produced media like photography (See Spirit Photography for more information). When locating spiritual content in a mechanically produced medium, the role of a human medium is fundamentally altered.<br />
<br />
The human medium that detects EVP in recorded sound, to apply Avital Ronnell's reading of technologically enabled spiritualism, is required to “take second place” (247), assuming the role of observer to the more frictionless transmission between spirits and a technical medium. The first step of this transmission occurs between a ghost and a machine, while the human interpretation thereof occurs afterward.<br />
<br />
The human medium's second position in EVP is a notable departure from one-step transmissions between ghosts and media that takes place in direct spirit-human communication. Lawrence Levan, for example, observed that a sensitive's “will must be passive” (36) if s/he is to enter a subjectivity conducive to receiving direct spiritual communication, abstaining from activity of the body and mind so as to facilitate transmission of spectral information. The type of 'passivity' required by direct spirit communication is distinct from that required in the act of repeatedly playing or manipulating a sound recording in search of EVP, however. EVP sensitives, while passive at some stages of locating and interpreting transmissions, must engage directly with various recording and playback technologies at others. <br />
<br />
The will-lessness of a sensitive in direct spiritual communication may, in certain ways, be one of the “pretechnological concepts” that Ronnell posits to be threatened with “unemployment” as it is replaced with newer, more technologically contemporary models. The technical expertise needed to produce, re-produce or find meaning in an EVP recording, for example, provides an alternative to the “high carelessness” (37) crucial in direct contact spiritualism, a passivity that allows information to be gathered without origin in a specific source or sense. The focus on one sense (hearing) and a very particular tool (recording/playback technology) is less will-less and careless than the unfocused sense needed to experience direct human-spirit contact. This shift requires a transition from unfocused reading of broad and diffuse sensory (and extra-sensory) application to the focused study of a technological 'lense' into the spirit realm. Thus un-focused perception is rendered 'unemployed' by the focused EVP-seeker.<br />
<br />
EVP does not only replace old models of spiritualist subjectivity, however, it also enables new ones. John J. Kucich, for example, identifies a diverse range of American Spiritualist traditions as simultaneously “universal and culturally specific” (153). Spiritualist practices are universal in their effect of rendering receiver and transmitter (either ghost or ghost-as-mediated-through-technology) “part in the great pattern and harmony which includes all unique events” (Levan 44), as evidence in the consistency to be found within a given cosmology, as evidence a particular model of life and afterlife's pervasiveness. The distinctness between various spiritualist techniques subsequently reveals distinction between various cosmologies.<br />
<br />
Whereas one-step spiritualism has historically 'empowered the disposessed subject' (Ronnell 249) that receives communication from ghosts through will-lessness, technical spiritualism and EVP replace the direct connection between spirit and life worlds with one that is mediated by technology. In effect, sound recordings are set up to make closer contact with the afterlife than their human listeners.<br />
<br />
<br />
==REPLACING HUMAN MEDIA: MEDIATING THE SPIRIT REALM==<br />
<br />
Kucich asserts that spiritualist practices have significantly “mediated the power relations within and between cultures in the United States” (xiii), both empowering the dispossessed and also providing a popular target for discriminatory treatment of believers as “unlettered” and “provincial” (43). The use of recorded sound as a medium is a rebuttal of such critiques that mobilizes technical skill as a marker of media and technological literacy to remediate the classist conflict between spiritualism's believers and nonbelievers. By ascribing the power to contact spirits not to a human, but to a machine, the machine serves as a distancing tool, deflecting certain criticisms from the spiritualist to his or her machine. <br />
<br />
EVP, by mobilizing socially acceptable skill sets like consumer electronic prowess and the purchase of recordings, casts paranormal subjectivities as reasonable technological and consumer behavior. In listening to a recording for EVP, humans may still need to enter a will-less subjectivity or other paranormal state of consciousness, but these altered states are historically seen within Spiritualist circles as neither less or more valid than other more normative states (Kucich 42). Rather, spiritualists typically believe that the utility of entering a particular state of perception “depends on what you are trying to do” (ibid). In terms of protecting one's self from the discrimination typical leveled against direct spiritual communicators, receiving transmissions from the dead secondhand via recording technology is often deemed preferable.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
==LIMINAL CONSCIOUSNESSES==<br />
<br />
Because of the requirement that technological spiritualists remain conscious enough to operate their equipment, locating EVP in a recording may be best accomplished while occupying some liminal state of consciousness between complete paranormal receptivity and that of normal listening practices.<br />
<br />
In entering a state of technological spiritualist consciousness, the EVP-seeker must observe a unity between the life and spirit worlds, locating its presence consistently in their sound technologies as well as in sound itself. <br />
<br />
<br />
==COMMODIFYING THE UNCANNY: HELL AWAITS==<br />
<br />
The sounds of EVP, existing in recorded format, are always available for circulation not only as spiritual information but also as commercial products. Consequently, the aesthetics of EVP are easily commodified, simulted, and sold as part of commercial recordings.<br />
<br />
Reversed voices, which sound quite similar to many instances of EVP, are one example of this commodifiable uncanniness. Heavy metal band Slayer, for example, deployed reversed voice recordings in their 1985 album “Hell Awaits”. The voices are recorded saying “Join Us”, then reversed in order to convey an unnatural control over time and sound. By using the aesthetic of earlier EVP recordings, Slayer reposition themselves as the controllers of uncanny sounds. The privileged unity between technology and spirits is appropriated, manipulated and desecrated. Slayer's ability to reproduce EVP-like sounds at will contextualizes EVP as 'unemployed', just another spooky audio trick. A listener in the liminal state of EVP-seeking consciousness might believe he or she is being beckoned by a chorus of dead souls, while the musicians would likely take mephistolean glee at the notion that they manipulated such a 'sensitive' listener.</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=EVP&diff=13343EVP2010-12-11T22:06:42Z<p>Jah450: Created page with 'EVP is an abbreviation for Electronic Voice Phenomena (click to redirect)'</p>
<hr />
<div>EVP is an abbreviation for [[Electronic Voice Phenomena]] (click to redirect)</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Electronic_Voice_Phenomena&diff=13342Electronic Voice Phenomena2010-12-11T22:06:06Z<p>Jah450: Created page with 'DETECTING A TECHNOSPIRITUAL UNITY Electronic Voice Phenomena, as one facet in a diverse array of paranormal perceptions, exists within a centuries-old spiritualist tradition…'</p>
<hr />
<div>[[DETECTING A TECHNOSPIRITUAL UNITY]]<br />
<br />
Electronic Voice Phenomena, as one facet in a diverse array of paranormal perceptions, exists within a centuries-old spiritualist traditions of contacting the dead, but uses recording technology alongside a 'sensitive' listener as media to interface with the dead. According to Lawrence Levan, the term 'sensitive' as a noun is used by many who study or pursue paranormal sensory phenomena to describe individuals who are exceptionally likely to experience paranormal states of awareness.<br />
<br />
In many instances of contact with ghosts, a sensitive is the main medium between ghosts and lay people. Many media have used automatic writing or similar inscriptive techniques to record what they are told by a spirit, but the sensitive nonetheless occupies a central position in the reception of paranormal communication as well as its transmission in another, more commonly legible forms-- for instance, writing or speech. This model of paranormal communication could be described as direct transmission or single step communication between ghosts and their human media.<br />
<br />
Since at least 1860, however, spiritualists have also located ghostly content in mechanically produced media like photography (See Spirit Photography for more information). When locating spiritual content in a mechanically produced medium, the role of a human medium is fundamentally altered.<br />
<br />
The human medium that detects EVP in recorded sound, to apply Avital Ronnell's reading of technologically enabled spiritualism, is required to “take second place” (247), assuming the role of observer to the more frictionless transmission between spirits and a technical medium. The first step of this transmission occurs between a ghost and a machine, while the human interpretation thereof occurs afterward.<br />
<br />
The human medium's second position in EVP is a notable departure from one-step transmissions between ghosts and media that takes place in direct spirit-human communication. Lawrence Levan, for example, observed that a sensitive's “will must be passive” (36) if s/he is to enter a subjectivity conducive to receiving direct spiritual communication, abstaining from activity of the body and mind so as to facilitate transmission of spectral information. The type of 'passivity' required by direct spirit communication is distinct from that required in the act of repeatedly playing or manipulating a sound recording in search of EVP, however. EVP sensitives, while passive at some stages of locating and interpreting transmissions, must engage directly with various recording and playback technologies at others. <br />
<br />
The will-lessness of a sensitive in direct spiritual communication may, in certain ways, be one of the “pretechnological concepts” that Ronnell posits to be threatened with “unemployment” as it is replaced with newer, more technologically contemporary models. The technical expertise needed to produce, re-produce or find meaning in an EVP recording, for example, provides an alternative to the “high carelessness” (37) crucial in direct contact spiritualism, a passivity that allows information to be gathered without origin in a specific source or sense. The focus on one sense (hearing) and a very particular tool (recording/playback technology) is less will-less and careless than the unfocused sense needed to experience direct human-spirit contact. This shift requires a transition from unfocused reading of broad and diffuse sensory (and extra-sensory) application to the focused study of a technological 'lense' into the spirit realm. Thus un-focused perception is rendered 'unemployed' by the focused EVP-seeker.<br />
<br />
EVP does not only replace old models of spiritualist subjectivity, however, it also enables new ones. John J. Kucich, for example, identifies a diverse range of American Spiritualist traditions as simultaneously “universal and culturally specific” (153). Spiritualist practices are universal in their effect of rendering receiver and transmitter (either ghost or ghost-as-mediated-through-technology) “part in the great pattern and harmony which includes all unique events” (Levan 44), as evidence in the consistency to be found within a given cosmology, as evidence a particular model of life and afterlife's pervasiveness. The distinctness between various spiritualist techniques subsequently reveals distinction between various cosmologies.<br />
<br />
Whereas one-step spiritualism has historically 'empowered the disposessed subject' (Ronnell 249) that receives communication from ghosts through will-lessness, technical spiritualism and EVP replace the direct connection between spirit and life worlds with one that is mediated by technology. In effect, sound recordings are set up to make closer contact with the afterlife than their human listeners.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[REPLACING HUMAN MEDIA: MEDIATING THE SPIRIT REALM]]<br />
<br />
Kucich asserts that spiritualist practices have significantly “mediated the power relations within and between cultures in the United States” (xiii), both empowering the dispossessed and also providing a popular target for discriminatory treatment of believers as “unlettered” and “provincial” (43). The use of recorded sound as a medium is a rebuttal of such critiques that mobilizes technical skill as a marker of media and technological literacy to remediate the classist conflict between spiritualism's believers and nonbelievers. By ascribing the power to contact spirits not to a human, but to a machine, the machine serves as a distancing tool, deflecting certain criticisms from the spiritualist to his or her machine. <br />
<br />
EVP, by mobilizing socially acceptable skill sets like consumer electronic prowess and the purchase of recordings, casts paranormal subjectivities as reasonable technological and consumer behavior. In listening to a recording for EVP, humans may still need to enter a will-less subjectivity or other paranormal state of consciousness, but these altered states are historically seen within Spiritualist circles as neither less or more valid than other more normative states (Kucich 42). Rather, spiritualists typically believe that the utility of entering a particular state of perception “depends on what you are trying to do” (ibid). In terms of protecting one's self from the discrimination typical leveled against direct spiritual communicators, receiving transmissions from the dead secondhand via recording technology is often deemed preferable.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[LIMINAL CONSCIOUSNESSES]]<br />
<br />
Because of the requirement that technological spiritualists remain conscious enough to operate their equipment, locating EVP in a recording may be best accomplished while occupying some liminal state of consciousness between complete paranormal receptivity and that of normal listening practices.<br />
<br />
In entering a state of technological spiritualist consciousness, the EVP-seeker must observe a unity between the life and spirit worlds, locating its presence consistently in their sound technologies as well as in sound itself. <br />
<br />
<br />
[[COMMODIFYING THE UNCANNY: HELL AWAITS]]<br />
<br />
The sounds of EVP, existing in recorded format, are always available for circulation not only as spiritual information but also as commercial products. Consequently, the aesthetics of EVP are easily commodified, simulted, and sold as part of commercial recordings.<br />
<br />
Reversed voices, which sound quite similar to many instances of EVP, are one example of this commodifiable uncanniness. Heavy metal band Slayer, for example, deployed reversed voice recordings in their 1985 album “Hell Awaits”. The voices are recorded saying “Join Us”, then reversed in order to convey an unnatural control over time and sound. By using the aesthetic of earlier EVP recordings, Slayer reposition themselves as the controllers of uncanny sounds. The privileged unity between technology and spirits is appropriated, manipulated and desecrated. Slayer's ability to reproduce EVP-like sounds at will contextualizes EVP as 'unemployed', just another spooky audio trick. A listener in the liminal state of EVP-seeking consciousness might believe he or she is being beckoned by a chorus of dead souls, while the musicians would likely take mephistolean glee at the notion that they manipulated such a 'sensitive' listener.</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Four_Loko&diff=12452Four Loko2010-11-18T17:41:40Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>Caffeinated Malt Liquor, declared unsafe and possibly illegal by FDA in Fall 2010.<br />
<br />
[[Category:Proposed Dossier]][[Category:Fall 2010]][[Category:Visuality]][[Category:Smell]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Four_Loko&diff=12451Four Loko2010-11-18T17:37:42Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>Caffeinated Malt Liquor, declared unsafe and possibly illegal by FDA in Fall 2010.<br />
<br />
[[Category:Proposed Dossier]][[Category:Fall 2010]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Four_Loko&diff=12450Four Loko2010-11-18T17:37:19Z<p>Jah450: Created page with 'Caffeinated Malt Liquor, declared unsafe and possibly illegal by FDA in Fall 2010. Proposed DossierFall 2010'</p>
<hr />
<div>Caffeinated Malt Liquor, declared unsafe and possibly illegal by FDA in Fall 2010.<br />
<br />
[[Proposed Dossier]][[Fall 2010]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Home_Video_Game_Consoles&diff=12214Sega Home Video Game Consoles2010-11-15T03:30:43Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Rez_ingame.jpg|right|thumb|300pix|Screenshot from "REZ", Sonic Team/Sega 2001.]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Sega Enterprises, LTD released five standalone home video game systems between 1983 and 1999, all of which are currently discontinued. The aim of this dossier is not to provide an exhaustive analysis of all Sega's dead media platforms, but rather to provide an overview of the company's home console division which serves as a portal for further investigation of its specific products. This dossier is concerned in particular with tracing the causes of Sega home systems' death and its relation to the ongoing negotiation between video games' military and arcade oriented genealogy as they adapt to domestic settings. <br />
<br />
In addition, this survey of Sega's large and obsolete body of products is an attempt to promote the archival and investigation of various obsolete video game technologies' historical importance to developing standards in the production, distribution, and experience of media technologies.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Origins ==<br />
<br />
=== Service Games: a Military-Industrial Entertainment Business ===<br />
<br />
The origins of Sega home video game consoles can be traced to David Rosen, a U.S. Air Force veteran who had been stationed in Japan. He began “a company in Japan named Rosen Enterprises that imported pinball machines as entertainment from the US” (De Peuter 91) after World War II. Rosen Enterprises merged with another American/Japanese amusement company in 1965 called Service Games.<br />
<br />
After merging, Service Games's name was shortened to Sega. In 1967, the company began producing its own mechanical arcade games for placement in Sega brand arcade locations around Japan.<br />
<br />
=== Arcade Gaming ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Altbeastplay.png|right|400pix|thumb|"Altered Beast" arcade screenshot. Sega, 1988.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:SpaceHarrier_arcadeflyer.png|right|400pix|thumb|Promotional flier for "Space Harrier". Sega AM2, 1985.]]<br />
<br />
Sega progenitor David Rosen recalls of early Sega arcade games: “The first game we built was Rifleman. Our first big hit was Periscope … From 1967 through 1979 we manufactured 140 different games” (DeMaria 233). Sega's earliest original productions played upon a number of militant and masculine tropes, including what media theorist Friedrich Kittler calls “structural correspondence between perspective and ballistics” (186).<br />
<br />
Cinematized representations of gunplay and marksmanship, popularized and formalized in wartime film, create “intertextual representative experiences”-- in this case “predicated on the player having existing knowledge … of how this specific type of action/spy hero masculinity is 'supposed' to operate” (Burrill 1), which includes aiming and firing weapons, identifying enemies, and basic visual familiarity with military machinery.<br />
<br />
Tapping into the culture of competition and masculinity inherited from the armed forces, Sega rooted its business model in facilitating “feats of strength and skill based on pain and violence” which produced and reproduced “male codes of power” (Burrill 6) in arcades. This militant approach to gaming was maintained throughout Sega's arcade and home offerings through the end of the 20th century.<br />
<br />
Doug Glen, Sega's VP of Business Development and Strategic Planning in the 1990's, described their business model in the following terms: <br />
<br />
“We look at it as a continuum of experience. You can leverage the asset from the highest end down to the mass market-- the home. We get into the leading edge and nurture the experience throughout the various manifestations” (De Peuter 137)<br />
<br />
For Sega, arcades constituted the 'leading edge' or 'highest end', while home systems provided an extension of the arcade experience for home markets. This emphasis on arcades and the audiences of “semidelinquent technophile” (Burrill 7) they catered to prevented Sega from developing home consoles and software that could gain popularity with domestic audiences of varied gender and taste. <br />
<br />
=== Sega SG-1000 & Sega Master System ===<br />
<br />
Sega released its first home video game console, the [[SG-1000]] in Japan on the same day in 1983 that Nintendo launched its FamiCom (short for “Family Computer”, marketed in the US as [[Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)]]. The SG-1000 was never released outside of Asia, where numerous third-party add-ons of dubious legality enabled it to play games for competing Colecovision and Atari 2600 systems (Kohler np).<br />
<br />
The system architecture was cloned and re-released by multiple companies beside Sega. The SG-1000's software and marketing were primarily concerned with re-mediating prior games and consoles, and the revenue from hardware sales was split between Sega and multiple other manufacturers. This lack of quality control was not unique to Sega and is widely credited with causing a video game industry crash in 1984.<br />
<br />
In 1985, Sega released the [[Sega Master System]], an 8-bit system designed to compete more effectively with Nintendo's NES. David Rosen recalls: <br />
<br />
*“after the game market collapse [in 1984]… the industry was fairly well written off. We had a product in the pipeline, but we had put it on the shelf. We took it off the shelf when we saw what was happening with Nintendo. But we were a year behind Nintendo and that was a very difficult hurdle to overcome” (DeMaria 234).<br />
<br />
The Sega Master System did not achieve notable success in Sega's primary markets (Japan and North America). It did, however, become popular in secondary markets, most notably Brazil and Europe, where consumers were less exposed to competing products. The possibility of marketing to underserved populations was thus revealed, and Sega repeated this approach, in certain ways, with its next console.<br />
<br />
== The 1990's ==<br />
<br />
===Genesis/Megadrive===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segacd32x.jpg|thumb|200pix|right|Fig. 2. A 2nd generation Sega Mega Drive with Mega CD and 32x attachments.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:Sonic1_box_usa.jpg|thumb|100pix|right|US packaging art for "Sonic the Hedgehog"]]<br />
<br />
<br />
“...initial NES players had gotten older and entered their teens. Their systems ended up in closets. They discovered girls. So we positioned Genesis as the product you graduated to. Once you put away your toys, you got Sega. And we gave them arcade games and sports” – Al Nilson, Sega of America Director of Marketing on launching the Genesis/Megadrive. (DeMaria 244)<br />
<br />
Between 1988 and 1989 Sega rolled out a 16-bit system in North America, Japan, and Europe. It was marketed as [[Sega Genesis]] in North America and Sega Mega Drive elsewhere. The system launched with ports of popular Sega arcade games like Golden Axe and Altered Beast, despite the fact that it “Looked like devil worship in the midwest” (DeMaria 247), according to Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske.<br />
<br />
The competitive games ported from Sega's arcade machines effectively provided “a sphere for bodily action as well as one in which the subject [could] fight off the looming threat of absent technologies” (Burrill 6), including home video games and computers, which recontextualized video gaming's arcade and military origins through “concealment, intimacy, [and] internalization” (Burril 3) in a mass-market domestic product. The Genesis is an example of domesticated technology providing a way for users to perform feats of power with military origins in the home, enabled by mass-market home television sets.<br />
<br />
With the Genesis, Sega helped usher in an era of 'console wars' against Nintendo. In order to compete with Nintendo's entrenched dominance in the home market, Sega produced home software that would expand upon the “Platform” genre of games defined by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers. These “cutesy jump 'n run games”, contain “a wide mix of gameplay elements” and include “identifiable characters and heroes”, thus deflecting some of the “controversy associated with more violent and disturbing game genres” (De Peuter 117) popular in arcades.<br />
<br />
Sega's character-driven platform game Sonic the Hedgehog, launched with the Genesis, featured a cartoon protagonist reminiscent of Bart Simpson and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, already popular with children and families on television. Simultaneously, Sonic the Hedgehog enabled players to navigate levels at a much higher speed than prior platform games, expanding the possibility for arcade-style displays of reflexes and prowess in home software.<br />
<br />
This two-tiered approach to software combined appeals to both military-industrial and domesticated video game tastes, though it leaned heavily on Sega's past in the military entertainment business. The Genesis hardware and marketing thereof was also thoroughly steeped in the culture of aggression that characterized Sega's entrepreneurial, arcade, and military origins. <br />
<br />
Because of the Nintendo NES's position of dominance in the home console marketplace of 1988, the company was “reluctant to innovate and vulnerable to being technologically leapfrogged” (De Peuter 129). Sega “followed the logic of the perpetual innovation economy” (ibid), engineering a console which could more faithfully reproduce the graphics of both arcade games and cartoon heroes than its competitors. <br />
<br />
Reliance on this type of blitzkrieg development toward new technological standards, a holdover from Sega's origins within the military-industrial economy, was a significant and recurring theme throughout the life cycle of their home hardware endeavors, contributing to their difficulty adapting to a rapidly domesticating home game market. <br />
<br />
==== Sega CD and 32x ====<br />
<br />
[[File:Night_Trap_Cover.jpg|right|thumb|US Box art for Night Trap. Digital Pictures/Sega 1992.]]<br />
<br />
The first suggestions that Sega was too aggressively masculine to continue its success in the home market arrived in the form of add-on hardware for the Genesis. The [[Sega CD]] (Mega CD in Europe and Japan), released in different markets between 1991 and 1993, was the second compact disc based home system commercially available. Most of its software relied heavily on digitized video of live actors, enabled by the CD's superior storage capabilities in comparison to the dominant medium of cartridges.<br />
<br />
“Standards determine how media reach our senses” (Kittler 36).<br />
<br />
CD-enabled full motion video game software on the Sega CD presented a shift from Sega's arcade roots, requiring that players spent much of their game-time watching video clips and not directly influencing on-screen actions. The Sega CD complicated Sega's already precarious balance between home and arcade game standards by adding an additional conflict between the emerging standards of computer cd-rom gaming and home theatre applications of CD storage technology. <br />
<br />
Without strong standards in place, the new format of CD FMV (full-motion video) games brought grainy video onto the television, heavily letterboxed and thus drawing attention to the “peep show character” (Kittler 223) of its small field of vision.<br />
<br />
The next add-on to hit markets dead-on-arrival was the [[32x]], a cartridge-based peripheral which piggybacked extra processors with the Genesis' original hardware. Released just months before its well-publicized standalone 32-bit CD-based system, the Saturn, however, little attention was paid to 32x by gamers or software developers. Again, lack of adherence to emerging standards concerning the lifecycle of home game consoles produced hardware that did not fit onto the “continuum of experiences” so crucial to Sega's earlier success.<br />
<br />
===Saturn===<br />
<br />
[[File:Egmsept97backcover.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Advertisement for World Series Baseball '98.]]<br />
<br />
Over 1994 and 1995, Sega released its standalone 32-bit system, the [[Sega Saturn]]. Launched with numerous arcade ports and rushed to market in attempt to repeat the Genesis' success at pre-empting competitors, Sega “miscalculated how quickly it [Saturn] would erode demand” for the Genesis. Within a year of Saturn's launch, “Sega of America took huge losses worldwide on warehouses full of unsold 16-bit games” (De Peuter 141).<br />
<br />
Saturn, though more popular than 32x or Sega CD, was still commercially unsuccessful. The system did not launch with a family-friendly franchise title like Sonic the Hedgehog, an affront to increasingly gender- and age- diverse home console audiences.<br />
<br />
However, much as certain filmmakers, reacting against “primacy of women cinemagoers” (Kittler 178) in determining a film's commercial success, originated the “masculine auteur film” (ibid), Sega's in-house software developers produced critically successful games such as NiGHTs into Dreams, a re-imagination of the two-dimensional platform genre in what came to be known as “2.5D” style. Gameplay takes place two axes much like a two-dimensional game, but is presented with from a viewpoint that moves through environments on all three axes.<br />
<br />
By 1998, however, Sega's market share against competitors Nintendo and Sony had dwindled to nine percent (De Peuter 141), as its aggressively masculine products failed to integrate with the changing home console market. Sega ignored the “very empirical” (Kittler 176) evidence of an age- and gender- diverse audience developing around the intersection of television and computer gaming, thus neglecting the era's emergent hybridity with cinematic content and audiences in increasingly general-purpose home theaters.<br />
<br />
=== The Dreamcast ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Dcmnov99p46sonic.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for Sonic Adventure. Sega, Sonic Team, 1999. Note the accusation that readers possess 'lame-ass reflexes'.]]<br />
<br />
In 1999, Sega launched its final home console, the [[Sega Dreamcast]]. Sega's first console to be designed in white rather than black plastic, it appeared initially as though the system could feminize Sega's product line, thus expanding its marketability to family audiences.<br />
<br />
Supporting this first impression, the Dreamcast launched with a family-friendly Sonic franchise game called Sonic Adventure. Sonic Adventure also used the Dreamcast's removable storage/display unit, the “VMU” to distribute a virtual pet minigame, playable on-the-go and similar to a [[Tamagotchi]].<br />
<br />
These apparent concessions to a television-watching living-room market did not carry across most of Dreamcast's other software or promotional materials, however. The system was promoted primarily to “14- to 24-year old dudes” (EGM Sept99 p174) at rock concerts and in inner cities, ostensibly targeting the demographic of “semidelinquent technophile” originally present both in arcades and “at the very origin of gaming's Pentagon-sponsored inception” (De Peuter 91).<br />
<br />
Just before the Dreamcast launched in 1999, Sega of America President Bernie Stolar described his business plan in the following terms:<br />
<br />
“...the next two Christmases for us are to show everyone that Sega is a leading company, and that Sega has the best software in the marketplace” (EGM 174)<br />
<br />
What did not factor into that plan was synergy with home theater hardware-- Sony's PlayStation2, launched in 2000, doubled as a DVD movie player, thus moving closer to what Friedrich Kittler might call a “general medium” (224), and certainly closer to a standard living-room appliance.<br />
<br />
Sega continued to offer primarily arcade ports and auteur games until the Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001.<br />
<br />
== Postmortem ==<br />
<br />
=== Competition, Arcades, and the Internet ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segachannel.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for the Sega Channel, 1995]]<br />
<br />
Sega's home console division displayed considerable reliance upon competitive arcade games and masculine auteur software with obvious military-industrial origins. These offerings came into marketplace conflict with various more effective “public dissimulations” in the business of “mystifying or denying” (De Peuter 181) such origins.<br />
<br />
Despite any qualitative 'gameplay value' present in Sega home products, their competitors' products possessed the symbolic value of rendering video gaming appropriate to a home theater environment, achieved intertextually through synergy between hardware design, software curation, marketing, and various other actions of “cultural intermediaries” (De Peuter 82). Rather than replacing “the mass consumers in the cinema hall with a single, lonely cybernaut” (Kittler 227) as had been done in their successful arcade and auteur games, Sega's competitors cinematized gaming for a mass audience. Game systems like Microsoft's X-Box and Sony's PlayStation2 added a new dimension of value to their products by providing DVD movie functionality in their machines, further dissimulating their military origins.<br />
<br />
In contrast, Sega undertook a number of costly experiments with online gaming during the lifespan of their home hardware division, attempting to capitalize upon “digital connectivity between many players (usually in their homes) who remain physically separated and isolated” (Burrill 62), enabling a type of dehumanized competitive sociality in a “clear extension of the arcade” (ibid).<br />
<br />
The experiments included [[Sega Channel]], a cable-tv add-on subscription service which provided about 50 Genesis games a month on a premium-channel pay format, and SegaNet, a 56k multiplayer network created in conjunction with AT&T for the Dreamcast. Both were unsuccessful, possibly because they relied on non-standard uses of technology. Sega Channel required extra hardware and a re-purposing of cable TV infrastructure, while SegaNet, despite Sega of America marketing director Charles Bellfield's claims that “There will be no problems on latency issues” (EGM 193), relied upon a [[56k modem]] to connect players over phone lines despite the emerging standards of broadband internet among online gamers.<br />
<br />
The Dreamcast hardware, however, lives on in the form of Sega's NAOMI arcade architecture, one of the most long-living arcade systems in history. Sega continues to produce both arcade and home software despite the defunctness of its home hardware division.<br />
<br />
=== Emulation ===<br />
<br />
Because Sega's home hardware systems have all been discontinued, very little software remains in print to accompany them. This presents numerous difficulties to enthusiasts, researchers and historians hoping to play them. The majority of activity concerning discontinued software and hardware for Sega's home systems happens through unofficial homebrew releases and emulators.<br />
<br />
By creating unlicensed software and emulators themselves, enthusiast “antiheros” demonstrate the skills and tools necessary to be “productive of [themselves]” (Burrill 124), becoming “the code, the coder and the decoder” (ibid)-- re-creating the hardware environments which created their identities through play in the past, re-articulating a new set of values in each new context of time or operating environment that the games are able to enter through emulation. <br />
<br />
In 2006, Sega began offering official emulations of certain 'classic' games through the online Wii Virtual Console (Parish np)-- completing a circuit between arcades, Sega home consoles, masculine enthusiast-tinkerers and the “General Medium” of a broadband-enabled home console.<br />
<br />
== Works Cited ==<br />
<br />
Burrill, Derek A. "Die Tryin': Video Games, Masculinity, Culture", 2008. Peter Lang, New York.<br />
<br />
DeMaria, Rusel and Johnny L. Wilson. "High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games", 2002. McGraw Hill/Osborne, Berkeley CA.<br />
<br />
De Peuter, Greig, Stephen Kline and Nick Dyer-Witheford. "Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing", 2003. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal QC.<br />
<br />
"It's Here, But Should You Buy One?" Electronic Gaming Monthly, September 1999. p168-175.<br />
<br />
Kittler, Friedrich. "Optical Media", 2010. Polity Press, Malden MA.<br />
<br />
Kohler, Chris. "Playing the SG-1000, Sega's First Game Machine". http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/10/sega-sg-1000/. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
Parish, Jeremy. "The Best Virtual Console Wii Games". http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3154803. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Fall 2010]] [[Category:Video Games]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Home_Video_Game_Consoles&diff=11882Sega Home Video Game Consoles2010-11-14T21:07:58Z<p>Jah450: /* The Dreamcast */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Rez_ingame.jpg|right|thumb|300pix|Screenshot from "REZ", Sonic Team/Sega 2001.]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Sega Enterprises, LTD released five standalone home video game systems between 1983 and 1999, all of which are currently discontinued. The aim of this dossier is not provide an exhaustive analysis of all Sega's dead media platforms, but rather to provide an overview of the company's home console division which serves as a portal for further investigation of its specific products. This dossier is concerned in particular with tracing the causes of Sega home systems' death and its relation to the ongoing negotiation between video games' military and arcade oriented genealogy as they adapt to domestic settings. <br />
<br />
In addition, this survey of Sega's large and obsolete body of products is an attempt to promote the archival and investigation of various obsolete video game technologies' historical importance to developing standards in the production, distribution, and experience of media technologies.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Origins ==<br />
<br />
=== Service Games: a Military-Industrial Entertainment Business ===<br />
<br />
The origins of Sega home video game consoles can be traced to David Rosen, a U.S. Air Force veteran who had been stationed in Japan. He began “a company in Japan named Rosen Enterprises that imported pinball machines as entertainment from the US” (De Peuter 91) after World War II. Rosen Enterprises merged with another American/Japanese amusement company in 1965 called Service Games.<br />
<br />
After merging, Service Games's name was shortened to Sega. In 1967, the company began producing its own mechanical arcade games for placement in Sega brand arcade locations around Japan.<br />
<br />
=== Arcade Gaming ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Altbeastplay.png|right|400pix|thumb|"Altered Beast" arcade screenshot. Sega, 1988.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:SpaceHarrier_arcadeflyer.png|right|400pix|thumb|Promotional flier for "Space Harrier". Sega AM2, 1985.]]<br />
<br />
Sega progenitor David Rosen recalls of early Sega arcade games: “The first game we built was Rifleman. Our first big hit was Periscope … From 1967 through 1979 we manufactured 140 different games” (DeMaria 233). Sega's earliest original productions played upon a number of militant and masculine tropes, including what media theorist Friedrich Kittler calls “structural correspondence between perspective and ballistics” (186).<br />
<br />
Cinematized representations of gunplay and marksmanship, popularized and formalized in wartime film, create “intertextual representative experiences”-- in this case “predicated on the player having existing knowledge … of how this specific type of action/spy hero masculinity is 'supposed' to operate” (Burrill 1), which includes aiming and firing weapons, identifying enemies, and basic visual familiarity with military machinery.<br />
<br />
Tapping into the culture of competition and masculinity inherited from the armed forces, Sega rooted its business model in facilitating “feats of strength and skill based on pain and violence” which produced and reproduced “male codes of power” (Burrill 6) in arcades. This militant approach to gaming was maintained throughout Sega's arcade and home offerings through the end of the 20th century.<br />
<br />
Doug Glen, Sega's VP of Business Development and Strategic Planning in the 1990's, described their business model in the following terms: <br />
<br />
“We look at it as a continuum of experience. You can leverage the asset from the highest end down to the mass market-- the home. We get into the leading edge and nurture the experience throughout the various manifestations” (De Peuter 137)<br />
<br />
For Sega, arcades constituted the 'leading edge' or 'highest end', while home systems provided an extension of the arcade experience for home markets. This emphasis on arcades and the audiences of “semidelinquent technophile” (Burrill 7) they catered to prevented Sega from developing home consoles and software that could gain popularity with domestic audiences of varied gender and taste. <br />
<br />
=== Sega SG-1000 & Sega Master System ===<br />
<br />
Sega released its first home video game console, the [[SG-1000]] in Japan on the same day in 1983 that Nintendo launched its FamiCom (short for “Family Computer”, marketed in the US as [[Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)]]. The SG-1000 was never released outside of Asia, where numerous third-party add-ons of dubious legality enabled it to play games for competing Colecovision and Atari 2600 systems (Kohler np).<br />
<br />
The system architecture was cloned and re-released by multiple companies beside Sega. The SG-1000's software and marketing were primarily concerned with re-mediating prior games and consoles, and the revenue from hardware sales was split between Sega and multiple other manufacturers. This lack of quality control was not unique to Sega and is widely credited with causing a video game industry crash in 1984.<br />
<br />
In 1985, Sega released the [[Sega Master System]], an 8-bit system designed to compete more effectively with Nintendo's NES. David Rosen recalls: <br />
<br />
*“after the game market collapse [in 1984]… the industry was fairly well written off. We had a product in the pipeline, but we had put it on the shelf. We took it off the shelf when we saw what was happening with Nintendo. But we were a year behind Nintendo and that was a very difficult hurdle to overcome” (DeMaria 234).<br />
<br />
The Sega Master System did not achieve notable success in Sega's primary markets (Japan and North America). It did, however, become popular in secondary markets, most notably Brazil and Europe, where consumers were less exposed to competing products. The possibility of marketing to underserved populations was thus revealed, and Sega repeated this approach, in certain ways, with its next console.<br />
<br />
== The 1990's ==<br />
<br />
===Genesis/Megadrive===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segacd32x.jpg|thumb|200pix|right|Fig. 2. A 2nd generation Sega Mega Drive with Mega CD and 32x attachments.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:Sonic1_box_usa.jpg|thumb|100pix|right|US packaging art for "Sonic the Hedgehog"]]<br />
<br />
<br />
“...initial NES players had gotten older and entered their teens. Their systems ended up in closets. They discovered girls. So we positioned Genesis as the product you graduated to. Once you put away your toys, you got Sega. And we gave them arcade games and sports” – Al Nilson, Sega of America Director of Marketing on launching the Genesis/Megadrive. (DeMaria 244)<br />
<br />
Between 1988 and 1989 Sega rolled out a 16-bit system in North America, Japan, and Europe. It was marketed as [[Sega Genesis]] in North America and Sega Mega Drive elsewhere. The system launched with ports of popular Sega arcade games like Golden Axe and Altered Beast, despite the fact that it “Looked like devil worship in the midwest” (DeMaria 247), according to Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske.<br />
<br />
The competitive games ported from Sega's arcade machines effectively provided “a sphere for bodily action as well as one in which the subject [could] fight off the looming threat of absent technologies” (Burrill 6), including home video games and computers, which recontextualized video gaming's arcade and military origins through “concealment, intimacy, [and] internalization” (Burril 3) in a mass-market domestic product. The Genesis is an example of domesticated technology providing a way for users to perform feats of power with military origins in the home, enabled by mass-market home television sets.<br />
<br />
With the Genesis, Sega helped usher in an era of 'console wars' against Nintendo. In order to compete with Nintendo's entrenched dominance in the home market, Sega produced home software that would expand upon the “Platform” genre of games defined by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers. These “cutesy jump 'n run games”, contain “a wide mix of gameplay elements” and include “identifiable characters and heroes”, thus deflecting some of the “controversy associated with more violent and disturbing game genres” (De Peuter 117) popular in arcades.<br />
<br />
Sega's character-driven platform game Sonic the Hedgehog, launched with the Genesis, featured a cartoon protagonist reminiscent of Bart Simpson and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, already popular with children and families on television. Simultaneously, Sonic the Hedgehog enabled players to navigate levels at a much higher speed than prior platform games, expanding the possibility for arcade-style displays of reflexes and prowess in home software.<br />
<br />
This two-tiered approach to software combined appeals to both military-industrial and domesticated video game tastes, though it leaned heavily on Sega's past in the military entertainment business. The Genesis hardware and marketing thereof was also thoroughly steeped in the culture of aggression that characterized Sega's entrepreneurial, arcade, and military origins. <br />
<br />
Because of the Nintendo NES's position of dominance in the home console marketplace of 1988, the company was “reluctant to innovate and vulnerable to being technologically leapfrogged” (De Peuter 129). Sega “followed the logic of the perpetual innovation economy” (ibid), engineering a console which could more faithfully reproduce the graphics of both arcade games and cartoon heroes than its competitors. <br />
<br />
Reliance on this type of blitzkrieg development toward new technological standards, a holdover from Sega's origins within the military-industrial economy, was a significant and recurring theme throughout the life cycle of their home hardware endeavors, contributing to their difficulty adapting to a rapidly domesticating home game market. <br />
<br />
==== Sega CD and 32x ====<br />
<br />
[[File:Night_Trap_Cover.jpg|right|thumb|US Box art for Night Trap. Digital Pictures/Sega 1992.]]<br />
<br />
The first suggestions that Sega was too aggressively masculine to continue its success in the home market arrived in the form of add-on hardware for the Genesis. The [[Sega CD]] (Mega CD in Europe and Japan), released in different markets between 1991 and 1993, was the second compact disc based home system commercially available. Most of its software relied heavily on digitized video of live actors, enabled by the CD's superior storage capabilities in comparison to the dominant medium of cartridges.<br />
<br />
“Standards determine how media reach our senses” (Kittler 36).<br />
<br />
CD-enabled full motion video game software on the Sega CD presented a shift from Sega's arcade roots, requiring that players spent much of their game-time watching video clips and not directly influencing on-screen actions. The Sega CD complicated Sega's already precarious balance between home and arcade game standards by adding an additional conflict between the emerging standards of computer cd-rom gaming and home theatre applications of CD storage technology. <br />
<br />
Without strong standards in place, the new format of CD FMV (full-motion video) games brought grainy video onto the television, heavily letterboxed and thus drawing attention to the “peep show character” (Kittler 223) of its small field of vision.<br />
<br />
The next add-on to hit markets dead-on-arrival was the [[32x]], a cartridge-based peripheral which piggybacked extra processors with the Genesis' original hardware. Released just months before its well-publicized standalone 32-bit CD-based system, the Saturn, however, little attention was paid to 32x by gamers or software developers. Again, lack of adherence to emerging standards concerning the lifecycle of home game consoles produced hardware that did not fit onto the “continuum of experiences” so crucial to Sega's earlier success.<br />
<br />
===Saturn===<br />
<br />
[[File:Egmsept97backcover.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Advertisement for World Series Baseball '98.]]<br />
<br />
Over 1994 and 1995, Sega released its standalone 32-bit system, the [[Sega Saturn]]. Launched with numerous arcade ports and rushed to market in attempt to repeat the Genesis' success at pre-empting competitors, Sega “miscalculated how quickly it [Saturn] would erode demand” for the Genesis. Within a year of Saturn's launch, “Sega of America took huge losses worldwide on warehouses full of unsold 16-bit games” (De Peuter 141).<br />
<br />
Saturn, though more popular than 32x or Sega CD, was still commercially unsuccessful. The system did not launch with a family-friendly franchise title like Sonic the Hedgehog, an affront to increasingly gender- and age- diverse home console audiences.<br />
<br />
However, much as certain filmmakers, reacting against “primacy of women cinemagoers” (Kittler 178) in determining a film's commercial success, originated the “masculine auteur film” (ibid), Sega's in-house software developers produced critically successful games such as NiGHTs into Dreams, a re-imagination of the two-dimensional platform genre in what came to be known as “2.5D” style. Gameplay takes place two axes much like a two-dimensional game, but is presented with from a viewpoint that moves through environments on all three axes.<br />
<br />
By 1998, however, Sega's market share against competitors Nintendo and Sony had dwindled to nine percent (De Peuter 141), as its aggressively masculine products failed to integrate with the changing home console market. Sega ignored the “very empirical” (Kittler 176) evidence of an age- and gender- diverse audience developing around the intersection of television and computer gaming, thus neglecting the era's emergent hybridity with cinematic content and audiences in increasingly general-purpose home theaters.<br />
<br />
=== The Dreamcast ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Dcmnov99p46sonic.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for Sonic Adventure. Sega, Sonic Team, 1999. Note the accusation that readers possess 'lame-ass reflexes'.]]<br />
<br />
In 1999, Sega launched its final home console, the [[Sega Dreamcast]]. Sega's first console to be designed in white rather than black plastic, it appeared initially as though the system could feminize Sega's product line, thus expanding its marketability to family audiences.<br />
<br />
Supporting this first impression, the Dreamcast launched with a family-friendly Sonic franchise game called Sonic Adventure. Sonic Adventure also used the Dreamcast's removable storage/display unit, the “VMU” to distribute a virtual pet minigame, playable on-the-go and similar to a [[Tamagotchi]].<br />
<br />
These apparent concessions to a television-watching living-room market did not carry across most of Dreamcast's other software or promotional materials, however. The system was promoted primarily to “14- to 24-year old dudes” (EGM Sept99 p174) at rock concerts and in inner cities, ostensibly targeting the demographic of “semidelinquent technophile” originally present both in arcades and “at the very origin of gaming's Pentagon-sponsored inception” (De Peuter 91).<br />
<br />
Just before the Dreamcast launched in 1999, Sega of America President Bernie Stolar described his business plan in the following terms:<br />
<br />
“...the next two Christmases for us are to show everyone that Sega is a leading company, and that Sega has the best software in the marketplace” (EGM 174)<br />
<br />
What did not factor into that plan was synergy with home theater hardware-- Sony's PlayStation2, launched in 2000, doubled as a DVD movie player, thus moving closer to what Friedrich Kittler might call a “general medium” (224), and certainly closer to a standard living-room appliance.<br />
<br />
Sega continued to offer primarily arcade ports and auteur games until the Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001.<br />
<br />
== Postmortem ==<br />
<br />
=== Competition, Arcades, and the Internet ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segachannel.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for the Sega Channel, 1995]]<br />
<br />
Sega's home console division displayed considerable reliance upon competitive arcade games and masculine auteur software with obvious military-industrial origins. These offerings came into marketplace conflict with various more effective “public dissimulations” in the business of “mystifying or denying” (De Peuter 181) such origins.<br />
<br />
Despite any qualitative 'gameplay value' present in Sega home products, their competitors' products possessed the symbolic value of rendering video gaming appropriate to a home theater environment, achieved intertextually through synergy between hardware design, software curation, marketing, and various other actions of “cultural intermediaries” (De Peuter 82). Rather than replacing “the mass consumers in the cinema hall with a single, lonely cybernaut” (Kittler 227) as had been done in their successful arcade and auteur games, Sega's competitors cinematized gaming for a mass audience. Game systems like Microsoft's X-Box and Sony's PlayStation2 added a new dimension of value to their products by providing DVD movie functionality in their machines, further dissimulating their military origins.<br />
<br />
In contrast, Sega undertook a number of costly experiments with online gaming during the lifespan of their home hardware division, attempting to capitalize upon “digital connectivity between many players (usually in their homes) who remain physically separated and isolated” (Burrill 62), enabling a type of dehumanized competitive sociality in a “clear extension of the arcade” (ibid).<br />
<br />
The experiments included [[Sega Channel]], a cable-tv add-on subscription service which provided about 50 Genesis games a month on a premium-channel pay format, and SegaNet, a 56k multiplayer network created in conjunction with AT&T for the Dreamcast. Both were unsuccessful, possibly because they relied on non-standard uses of technology. Sega Channel required extra hardware and a re-purposing of cable TV infrastructure, while SegaNet, despite Sega of America marketing director Charles Bellfield's claims that “There will be no problems on latency issues” (EGM 193), relied upon a [[56k modem]] to connect players over phone lines despite the emerging standards of broadband internet among online gamers.<br />
<br />
The Dreamcast hardware, however, lives on in the form of Sega's NAOMI arcade architecture, one of the most long-living arcade systems in history. Sega continues to produce both arcade and home software despite the defunctness of its home hardware division.<br />
<br />
=== Emulation ===<br />
<br />
Because Sega's home hardware systems have all been discontinued, very little software remains in print to accompany them. This presents numerous difficulties to enthusiasts, researchers and historians hoping to play them. The majority of activity concerning discontinued software and hardware for Sega's home systems happens through unofficial homebrew releases and emulators.<br />
<br />
By creating unlicensed software and emulators themselves, enthusiast “antiheros” demonstrate the skills and tools necessary to be “productive of [themselves]” (Burrill 124), becoming “the code, the coder and the decoder” (ibid)-- re-creating the hardware environments which created their identities through play in the past, re-articulating a new set of values in each new context of time or operating environment that the games are able to enter through emulation. <br />
<br />
In 2006, Sega began offering official emulations of certain 'classic' games through the online Wii Virtual Console (Parish np)-- completing a circuit between arcades, Sega home consoles, masculine enthusiast-tinkerers and the “General Medium” of a broadband-enabled home console.<br />
<br />
== Works Cited ==<br />
<br />
Burrill, Derek A. "Die Tryin': Video Games, Masculinity, Culture", 2008. Peter Lang, New York.<br />
<br />
DeMaria, Rusel and Johnny L. Wilson. "High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games", 2002. McGraw Hill/Osborne, Berkeley CA.<br />
<br />
De Peuter, Greig, Stephen Kline and Nick Dyer-Witheford. "Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing", 2003. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal QC.<br />
<br />
"It's Here, But Should You Buy One?" Electronic Gaming Monthly, September 1999. p168-175.<br />
<br />
Kittler, Friedrich. "Optical Media", 2010. Polity Press, Malden MA.<br />
<br />
Kohler, Chris. "Playing the SG-1000, Sega's First Game Machine". http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/10/sega-sg-1000/. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
Parish, Jeremy. "The Best Virtual Console Wii Games". http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3154803. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Fall 2010]] [[Category:Video Games]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Home_Video_Game_Consoles&diff=11765Sega Home Video Game Consoles2010-11-14T02:05:26Z<p>Jah450: /* Competition, Arcades, and the Internet */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Rez_ingame.jpg|right|thumb|300pix|Screenshot from "REZ", Sonic Team/Sega 2001.]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Sega Enterprises, LTD released five standalone home video game systems between 1983 and 1999, all of which are currently discontinued. The aim of this dossier is not provide an exhaustive analysis of all Sega's dead media platforms, but rather to provide an overview of the company's home console division which serves as a portal for further investigation of its specific products. This dossier is concerned in particular with tracing the causes of Sega home systems' death and its relation to the ongoing negotiation between video games' military and arcade oriented genealogy as they adapt to domestic settings. <br />
<br />
In addition, this survey of Sega's large and obsolete body of products is an attempt to promote the archival and investigation of various obsolete video game technologies' historical importance to developing standards in the production, distribution, and experience of media technologies.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Origins ==<br />
<br />
=== Service Games: a Military-Industrial Entertainment Business ===<br />
<br />
The origins of Sega home video game consoles can be traced to David Rosen, a U.S. Air Force veteran who had been stationed in Japan. He began “a company in Japan named Rosen Enterprises that imported pinball machines as entertainment from the US” (De Peuter 91) after World War II. Rosen Enterprises merged with another American/Japanese amusement company in 1965 called Service Games.<br />
<br />
After merging, Service Games's name was shortened to Sega. In 1967, the company began producing its own mechanical arcade games for placement in Sega brand arcade locations around Japan.<br />
<br />
=== Arcade Gaming ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Altbeastplay.png|right|400pix|thumb|"Altered Beast" arcade screenshot. Sega, 1988.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:SpaceHarrier_arcadeflyer.png|right|400pix|thumb|Promotional flier for "Space Harrier". Sega AM2, 1985.]]<br />
<br />
Sega progenitor David Rosen recalls of early Sega arcade games: “The first game we built was Rifleman. Our first big hit was Periscope … From 1967 through 1979 we manufactured 140 different games” (DeMaria 233). Sega's earliest original productions played upon a number of militant and masculine tropes, including what media theorist Friedrich Kittler calls “structural correspondence between perspective and ballistics” (186).<br />
<br />
Cinematized representations of gunplay and marksmanship, popularized and formalized in wartime film, create “intertextual representative experiences”-- in this case “predicated on the player having existing knowledge … of how this specific type of action/spy hero masculinity is 'supposed' to operate” (Burrill 1), which includes aiming and firing weapons, identifying enemies, and basic visual familiarity with military machinery.<br />
<br />
Tapping into the culture of competition and masculinity inherited from the armed forces, Sega rooted its business model in facilitating “feats of strength and skill based on pain and violence” which produced and reproduced “male codes of power” (Burrill 6) in arcades. This militant approach to gaming was maintained throughout Sega's arcade and home offerings through the end of the 20th century.<br />
<br />
Doug Glen, Sega's VP of Business Development and Strategic Planning in the 1990's, described their business model in the following terms: <br />
<br />
“We look at it as a continuum of experience. You can leverage the asset from the highest end down to the mass market-- the home. We get into the leading edge and nurture the experience throughout the various manifestations” (De Peuter 137)<br />
<br />
For Sega, arcades constituted the 'leading edge' or 'highest end', while home systems provided an extension of the arcade experience for home markets. This emphasis on arcades and the audiences of “semidelinquent technophile” (Burrill 7) they catered to prevented Sega from developing home consoles and software that could gain popularity with domestic audiences of varied gender and taste. <br />
<br />
=== Sega SG-1000 & Sega Master System ===<br />
<br />
Sega released its first home video game console, the [[SG-1000]] in Japan on the same day in 1983 that Nintendo launched its FamiCom (short for “Family Computer”, marketed in the US as [[Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)]]. The SG-1000 was never released outside of Asia, where numerous third-party add-ons of dubious legality enabled it to play games for competing Colecovision and Atari 2600 systems (Kohler np).<br />
<br />
The system architecture was cloned and re-released by multiple companies beside Sega. The SG-1000's software and marketing were primarily concerned with re-mediating prior games and consoles, and the revenue from hardware sales was split between Sega and multiple other manufacturers. This lack of quality control was not unique to Sega and is widely credited with causing a video game industry crash in 1984.<br />
<br />
In 1985, Sega released the [[Sega Master System]], an 8-bit system designed to compete more effectively with Nintendo's NES. David Rosen recalls: <br />
<br />
*“after the game market collapse [in 1984]… the industry was fairly well written off. We had a product in the pipeline, but we had put it on the shelf. We took it off the shelf when we saw what was happening with Nintendo. But we were a year behind Nintendo and that was a very difficult hurdle to overcome” (DeMaria 234).<br />
<br />
The Sega Master System did not achieve notable success in Sega's primary markets (Japan and North America). It did, however, become popular in secondary markets, most notably Brazil and Europe, where consumers were less exposed to competing products. The possibility of marketing to underserved populations was thus revealed, and Sega repeated this approach, in certain ways, with its next console.<br />
<br />
== The 1990's ==<br />
<br />
===Genesis/Megadrive===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segacd32x.jpg|thumb|200pix|right|Fig. 2. A 2nd generation Sega Mega Drive with Mega CD and 32x attachments.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:Sonic1_box_usa.jpg|thumb|100pix|right|US packaging art for "Sonic the Hedgehog"]]<br />
<br />
<br />
“...initial NES players had gotten older and entered their teens. Their systems ended up in closets. They discovered girls. So we positioned Genesis as the product you graduated to. Once you put away your toys, you got Sega. And we gave them arcade games and sports” – Al Nilson, Sega of America Director of Marketing on launching the Genesis/Megadrive. (DeMaria 244)<br />
<br />
Between 1988 and 1989 Sega rolled out a 16-bit system in North America, Japan, and Europe. It was marketed as [[Sega Genesis]] in North America and Sega Mega Drive elsewhere. The system launched with ports of popular Sega arcade games like Golden Axe and Altered Beast, despite the fact that it “Looked like devil worship in the midwest” (DeMaria 247), according to Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske.<br />
<br />
The competitive games ported from Sega's arcade machines effectively provided “a sphere for bodily action as well as one in which the subject [could] fight off the looming threat of absent technologies” (Burrill 6), including home video games and computers, which recontextualized video gaming's arcade and military origins through “concealment, intimacy, [and] internalization” (Burril 3) in a mass-market domestic product. The Genesis is an example of domesticated technology providing a way for users to perform feats of power with military origins in the home, enabled by mass-market home television sets.<br />
<br />
With the Genesis, Sega helped usher in an era of 'console wars' against Nintendo. In order to compete with Nintendo's entrenched dominance in the home market, Sega produced home software that would expand upon the “Platform” genre of games defined by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers. These “cutesy jump 'n run games”, contain “a wide mix of gameplay elements” and include “identifiable characters and heroes”, thus deflecting some of the “controversy associated with more violent and disturbing game genres” (De Peuter 117) popular in arcades.<br />
<br />
Sega's character-driven platform game Sonic the Hedgehog, launched with the Genesis, featured a cartoon protagonist reminiscent of Bart Simpson and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, already popular with children and families on television. Simultaneously, Sonic the Hedgehog enabled players to navigate levels at a much higher speed than prior platform games, expanding the possibility for arcade-style displays of reflexes and prowess in home software.<br />
<br />
This two-tiered approach to software combined appeals to both military-industrial and domesticated video game tastes, though it leaned heavily on Sega's past in the military entertainment business. The Genesis hardware and marketing thereof was also thoroughly steeped in the culture of aggression that characterized Sega's entrepreneurial, arcade, and military origins. <br />
<br />
Because of the Nintendo NES's position of dominance in the home console marketplace of 1988, the company was “reluctant to innovate and vulnerable to being technologically leapfrogged” (De Peuter 129). Sega “followed the logic of the perpetual innovation economy” (ibid), engineering a console which could more faithfully reproduce the graphics of both arcade games and cartoon heroes than its competitors. <br />
<br />
Reliance on this type of blitzkrieg development toward new technological standards, a holdover from Sega's origins within the military-industrial economy, was a significant and recurring theme throughout the life cycle of their home hardware endeavors, contributing to their difficulty adapting to a rapidly domesticating home game market. <br />
<br />
==== Sega CD and 32x ====<br />
<br />
[[File:Night_Trap_Cover.jpg|right|thumb|US Box art for Night Trap. Digital Pictures/Sega 1992.]]<br />
<br />
The first suggestions that Sega was too aggressively masculine to continue its success in the home market arrived in the form of add-on hardware for the Genesis. The [[Sega CD]] (Mega CD in Europe and Japan), released in different markets between 1991 and 1993, was the second compact disc based home system commercially available. Most of its software relied heavily on digitized video of live actors, enabled by the CD's superior storage capabilities in comparison to the dominant medium of cartridges.<br />
<br />
“Standards determine how media reach our senses” (Kittler 36).<br />
<br />
CD-enabled full motion video game software on the Sega CD presented a shift from Sega's arcade roots, requiring that players spent much of their game-time watching video clips and not directly influencing on-screen actions. The Sega CD complicated Sega's already precarious balance between home and arcade game standards by adding an additional conflict between the emerging standards of computer cd-rom gaming and home theatre applications of CD storage technology. <br />
<br />
Without strong standards in place, the new format of CD FMV (full-motion video) games brought grainy video onto the television, heavily letterboxed and thus drawing attention to the “peep show character” (Kittler 223) of its small field of vision.<br />
<br />
The next add-on to hit markets dead-on-arrival was the [[32x]], a cartridge-based peripheral which piggybacked extra processors with the Genesis' original hardware. Released just months before its well-publicized standalone 32-bit CD-based system, the Saturn, however, little attention was paid to 32x by gamers or software developers. Again, lack of adherence to emerging standards concerning the lifecycle of home game consoles produced hardware that did not fit onto the “continuum of experiences” so crucial to Sega's earlier success.<br />
<br />
===Saturn===<br />
<br />
[[File:Egmsept97backcover.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Advertisement for World Series Baseball '98.]]<br />
<br />
Over 1994 and 1995, Sega released its standalone 32-bit system, the [[Sega Saturn]]. Launched with numerous arcade ports and rushed to market in attempt to repeat the Genesis' success at pre-empting competitors, Sega “miscalculated how quickly it [Saturn] would erode demand” for the Genesis. Within a year of Saturn's launch, “Sega of America took huge losses worldwide on warehouses full of unsold 16-bit games” (De Peuter 141).<br />
<br />
Saturn, though more popular than 32x or Sega CD, was still commercially unsuccessful. The system did not launch with a family-friendly franchise title like Sonic the Hedgehog, an affront to increasingly gender- and age- diverse home console audiences.<br />
<br />
However, much as certain filmmakers, reacting against “primacy of women cinemagoers” (Kittler 178) in determining a film's commercial success, originated the “masculine auteur film” (ibid), Sega's in-house software developers produced critically successful games such as NiGHTs into Dreams, a re-imagination of the two-dimensional platform genre in what came to be known as “2.5D” style. Gameplay takes place two axes much like a two-dimensional game, but is presented with from a viewpoint that moves through environments on all three axes.<br />
<br />
By 1998, however, Sega's market share against competitors Nintendo and Sony had dwindled to nine percent (De Peuter 141), as its aggressively masculine products failed to integrate with the changing home console market. Sega ignored the “very empirical” (Kittler 176) evidence of an age- and gender- diverse audience developing around the intersection of television and computer gaming, thus neglecting the era's emergent hybridity with cinematic content and audiences in increasingly general-purpose home theaters.<br />
<br />
=== The Dreamcast ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Dcmnov99p46sonic.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for Sonic Adventure. Sega, Sonic Team, 1999. Note the accusation that readers possess 'lame-ass reflexes'.]]<br />
<br />
In 1999, Sega launched its final home console, the [[Sega Dreamcast]]. Sega's first console to be designed in white rather than black plastic, it appeared initially as though the system could feminize Sega's product line, thus expanding its marketability to family audiences.<br />
<br />
Supporting this first impression, the Dreamcat launched with a family-friendly Sonic franchise game called Sonic Adventure. Sonic Adventure also used the Dreamcast's removable storage/display unit, the “VMU” to distribute a virtual pet minigame, playable on-the-go and similar to a [[Tamagotchi]].<br />
<br />
These apparent concessions to a television-watching living-room market did not carry across most of Dreamcast's other software or promotional materials, however. The system was promoted primarily to “14- to 24-year old dudes” (EGM Sept99 p174) at rock concerts and in inner cities, ostensibly targeting the demographic of “semidelinquent technophile” originally present both in arcades and “at the very origin of gaming's Pentagon-sponsored inception” (De Peuter 91).<br />
<br />
Just before the Dreamcast launched in 1999, Sega of America President Bernie Stolar described his business plan in the following terms:<br />
<br />
“...the next two Christmases for us are to show everyone that Sega is a leading company, and that Sega has the best software in the marketplace” (EGM 174)<br />
<br />
What did not factor into that plan was synergy with home theater hardware-- Sony's PlayStation2, launched in 2000, doubled as a DVD movie player, thus moving closer to what Friedrich Kittler might call a “general medium” (224), and certainly closer to a standard living-room appliance.<br />
<br />
Sega continued to offer primarily arcade ports and auteur games until the Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001.<br />
<br />
== Postmortem ==<br />
<br />
=== Competition, Arcades, and the Internet ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segachannel.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for the Sega Channel, 1995]]<br />
<br />
Sega's home console division displayed considerable reliance upon competitive arcade games and masculine auteur software with obvious military-industrial origins. These offerings came into marketplace conflict with various more effective “public dissimulations” in the business of “mystifying or denying” (De Peuter 181) such origins.<br />
<br />
Despite any qualitative 'gameplay value' present in Sega home products, their competitors' products possessed the symbolic value of rendering video gaming appropriate to a home theater environment, achieved intertextually through synergy between hardware design, software curation, marketing, and various other actions of “cultural intermediaries” (De Peuter 82). Rather than replacing “the mass consumers in the cinema hall with a single, lonely cybernaut” (Kittler 227) as had been done in their successful arcade and auteur games, Sega's competitors cinematized gaming for a mass audience. Game systems like Microsoft's X-Box and Sony's PlayStation2 added a new dimension of value to their products by providing DVD movie functionality in their machines, further dissimulating their military origins.<br />
<br />
In contrast, Sega undertook a number of costly experiments with online gaming during the lifespan of their home hardware division, attempting to capitalize upon “digital connectivity between many players (usually in their homes) who remain physically separated and isolated” (Burrill 62), enabling a type of dehumanized competitive sociality in a “clear extension of the arcade” (ibid).<br />
<br />
The experiments included [[Sega Channel]], a cable-tv add-on subscription service which provided about 50 Genesis games a month on a premium-channel pay format, and SegaNet, a 56k multiplayer network created in conjunction with AT&T for the Dreamcast. Both were unsuccessful, possibly because they relied on non-standard uses of technology. Sega Channel required extra hardware and a re-purposing of cable TV infrastructure, while SegaNet, despite Sega of America marketing director Charles Bellfield's claims that “There will be no problems on latency issues” (EGM 193), relied upon a [[56k modem]] to connect players over phone lines despite the emerging standards of broadband internet among online gamers.<br />
<br />
The Dreamcast hardware, however, lives on in the form of Sega's NAOMI arcade architecture, one of the most long-living arcade systems in history. Sega continues to produce both arcade and home software despite the defunctness of its home hardware division.<br />
<br />
=== Emulation ===<br />
<br />
Because Sega's home hardware systems have all been discontinued, very little software remains in print to accompany them. This presents numerous difficulties to enthusiasts, researchers and historians hoping to play them. The majority of activity concerning discontinued software and hardware for Sega's home systems happens through unofficial homebrew releases and emulators.<br />
<br />
By creating unlicensed software and emulators themselves, enthusiast “antiheros” demonstrate the skills and tools necessary to be “productive of [themselves]” (Burrill 124), becoming “the code, the coder and the decoder” (ibid)-- re-creating the hardware environments which created their identities through play in the past, re-articulating a new set of values in each new context of time or operating environment that the games are able to enter through emulation. <br />
<br />
In 2006, Sega began offering official emulations of certain 'classic' games through the online Wii Virtual Console (Parish np)-- completing a circuit between arcades, Sega home consoles, masculine enthusiast-tinkerers and the “General Medium” of a broadband-enabled home console.<br />
<br />
== Works Cited ==<br />
<br />
Burrill, Derek A. "Die Tryin': Video Games, Masculinity, Culture", 2008. Peter Lang, New York.<br />
<br />
DeMaria, Rusel and Johnny L. Wilson. "High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games", 2002. McGraw Hill/Osborne, Berkeley CA.<br />
<br />
De Peuter, Greig, Stephen Kline and Nick Dyer-Witheford. "Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing", 2003. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal QC.<br />
<br />
"It's Here, But Should You Buy One?" Electronic Gaming Monthly, September 1999. p168-175.<br />
<br />
Kittler, Friedrich. "Optical Media", 2010. Polity Press, Malden MA.<br />
<br />
Kohler, Chris. "Playing the SG-1000, Sega's First Game Machine". http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/10/sega-sg-1000/. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
Parish, Jeremy. "The Best Virtual Console Wii Games". http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3154803. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Fall 2010]] [[Category:Video Games]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Home_Video_Game_Consoles&diff=11760Sega Home Video Game Consoles2010-11-14T01:03:40Z<p>Jah450: /* Emulation */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Rez_ingame.jpg|right|thumb|300pix|Screenshot from "REZ", Sonic Team/Sega 2001.]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Sega Enterprises, LTD released five standalone home video game systems between 1983 and 1999, all of which are currently discontinued. The aim of this dossier is not provide an exhaustive analysis of all Sega's dead media platforms, but rather to provide an overview of the company's home console division which serves as a portal for further investigation of its specific products. This dossier is concerned in particular with tracing the causes of Sega home systems' death and its relation to the ongoing negotiation between video games' military and arcade oriented genealogy as they adapt to domestic settings. <br />
<br />
In addition, this survey of Sega's large and obsolete body of products is an attempt to promote the archival and investigation of various obsolete video game technologies' historical importance to developing standards in the production, distribution, and experience of media technologies.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Origins ==<br />
<br />
=== Service Games: a Military-Industrial Entertainment Business ===<br />
<br />
The origins of Sega home video game consoles can be traced to David Rosen, a U.S. Air Force veteran who had been stationed in Japan. He began “a company in Japan named Rosen Enterprises that imported pinball machines as entertainment from the US” (De Peuter 91) after World War II. Rosen Enterprises merged with another American/Japanese amusement company in 1965 called Service Games.<br />
<br />
After merging, Service Games's name was shortened to Sega. In 1967, the company began producing its own mechanical arcade games for placement in Sega brand arcade locations around Japan.<br />
<br />
=== Arcade Gaming ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Altbeastplay.png|right|400pix|thumb|"Altered Beast" arcade screenshot. Sega, 1988.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:SpaceHarrier_arcadeflyer.png|right|400pix|thumb|Promotional flier for "Space Harrier". Sega AM2, 1985.]]<br />
<br />
Sega progenitor David Rosen recalls of early Sega arcade games: “The first game we built was Rifleman. Our first big hit was Periscope … From 1967 through 1979 we manufactured 140 different games” (DeMaria 233). Sega's earliest original productions played upon a number of militant and masculine tropes, including what media theorist Friedrich Kittler calls “structural correspondence between perspective and ballistics” (186).<br />
<br />
Cinematized representations of gunplay and marksmanship, popularized and formalized in wartime film, create “intertextual representative experiences”-- in this case “predicated on the player having existing knowledge … of how this specific type of action/spy hero masculinity is 'supposed' to operate” (Burrill 1), which includes aiming and firing weapons, identifying enemies, and basic visual familiarity with military machinery.<br />
<br />
Tapping into the culture of competition and masculinity inherited from the armed forces, Sega rooted its business model in facilitating “feats of strength and skill based on pain and violence” which produced and reproduced “male codes of power” (Burrill 6) in arcades. This militant approach to gaming was maintained throughout Sega's arcade and home offerings through the end of the 20th century.<br />
<br />
Doug Glen, Sega's VP of Business Development and Strategic Planning in the 1990's, described their business model in the following terms: <br />
<br />
“We look at it as a continuum of experience. You can leverage the asset from the highest end down to the mass market-- the home. We get into the leading edge and nurture the experience throughout the various manifestations” (De Peuter 137)<br />
<br />
For Sega, arcades constituted the 'leading edge' or 'highest end', while home systems provided an extension of the arcade experience for home markets. This emphasis on arcades and the audiences of “semidelinquent technophile” (Burrill 7) they catered to prevented Sega from developing home consoles and software that could gain popularity with domestic audiences of varied gender and taste. <br />
<br />
=== Sega SG-1000 & Sega Master System ===<br />
<br />
Sega released its first home video game console, the [[SG-1000]] in Japan on the same day in 1983 that Nintendo launched its FamiCom (short for “Family Computer”, marketed in the US as [[Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)]]. The SG-1000 was never released outside of Asia, where numerous third-party add-ons of dubious legality enabled it to play games for competing Colecovision and Atari 2600 systems (Kohler np).<br />
<br />
The system architecture was cloned and re-released by multiple companies beside Sega. The SG-1000's software and marketing were primarily concerned with re-mediating prior games and consoles, and the revenue from hardware sales was split between Sega and multiple other manufacturers. This lack of quality control was not unique to Sega and is widely credited with causing a video game industry crash in 1984.<br />
<br />
In 1985, Sega released the [[Sega Master System]], an 8-bit system designed to compete more effectively with Nintendo's NES. David Rosen recalls: <br />
<br />
*“after the game market collapse [in 1984]… the industry was fairly well written off. We had a product in the pipeline, but we had put it on the shelf. We took it off the shelf when we saw what was happening with Nintendo. But we were a year behind Nintendo and that was a very difficult hurdle to overcome” (DeMaria 234).<br />
<br />
The Sega Master System did not achieve notable success in Sega's primary markets (Japan and North America). It did, however, become popular in secondary markets, most notably Brazil and Europe, where consumers were less exposed to competing products. The possibility of marketing to underserved populations was thus revealed, and Sega repeated this approach, in certain ways, with its next console.<br />
<br />
== The 1990's ==<br />
<br />
===Genesis/Megadrive===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segacd32x.jpg|thumb|200pix|right|Fig. 2. A 2nd generation Sega Mega Drive with Mega CD and 32x attachments.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:Sonic1_box_usa.jpg|thumb|100pix|right|US packaging art for "Sonic the Hedgehog"]]<br />
<br />
<br />
“...initial NES players had gotten older and entered their teens. Their systems ended up in closets. They discovered girls. So we positioned Genesis as the product you graduated to. Once you put away your toys, you got Sega. And we gave them arcade games and sports” – Al Nilson, Sega of America Director of Marketing on launching the Genesis/Megadrive. (DeMaria 244)<br />
<br />
Between 1988 and 1989 Sega rolled out a 16-bit system in North America, Japan, and Europe. It was marketed as [[Sega Genesis]] in North America and Sega Mega Drive elsewhere. The system launched with ports of popular Sega arcade games like Golden Axe and Altered Beast, despite the fact that it “Looked like devil worship in the midwest” (DeMaria 247), according to Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske.<br />
<br />
The competitive games ported from Sega's arcade machines effectively provided “a sphere for bodily action as well as one in which the subject [could] fight off the looming threat of absent technologies” (Burrill 6), including home video games and computers, which recontextualized video gaming's arcade and military origins through “concealment, intimacy, [and] internalization” (Burril 3) in a mass-market domestic product. The Genesis is an example of domesticated technology providing a way for users to perform feats of power with military origins in the home, enabled by mass-market home television sets.<br />
<br />
With the Genesis, Sega helped usher in an era of 'console wars' against Nintendo. In order to compete with Nintendo's entrenched dominance in the home market, Sega produced home software that would expand upon the “Platform” genre of games defined by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers. These “cutesy jump 'n run games”, contain “a wide mix of gameplay elements” and include “identifiable characters and heroes”, thus deflecting some of the “controversy associated with more violent and disturbing game genres” (De Peuter 117) popular in arcades.<br />
<br />
Sega's character-driven platform game Sonic the Hedgehog, launched with the Genesis, featured a cartoon protagonist reminiscent of Bart Simpson and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, already popular with children and families on television. Simultaneously, Sonic the Hedgehog enabled players to navigate levels at a much higher speed than prior platform games, expanding the possibility for arcade-style displays of reflexes and prowess in home software.<br />
<br />
This two-tiered approach to software combined appeals to both military-industrial and domesticated video game tastes, though it leaned heavily on Sega's past in the military entertainment business. The Genesis hardware and marketing thereof was also thoroughly steeped in the culture of aggression that characterized Sega's entrepreneurial, arcade, and military origins. <br />
<br />
Because of the Nintendo NES's position of dominance in the home console marketplace of 1988, the company was “reluctant to innovate and vulnerable to being technologically leapfrogged” (De Peuter 129). Sega “followed the logic of the perpetual innovation economy” (ibid), engineering a console which could more faithfully reproduce the graphics of both arcade games and cartoon heroes than its competitors. <br />
<br />
Reliance on this type of blitzkrieg development toward new technological standards, a holdover from Sega's origins within the military-industrial economy, was a significant and recurring theme throughout the life cycle of their home hardware endeavors, contributing to their difficulty adapting to a rapidly domesticating home game market. <br />
<br />
==== Sega CD and 32x ====<br />
<br />
[[File:Night_Trap_Cover.jpg|right|thumb|US Box art for Night Trap. Digital Pictures/Sega 1992.]]<br />
<br />
The first suggestions that Sega was too aggressively masculine to continue its success in the home market arrived in the form of add-on hardware for the Genesis. The [[Sega CD]] (Mega CD in Europe and Japan), released in different markets between 1991 and 1993, was the second compact disc based home system commercially available. Most of its software relied heavily on digitized video of live actors, enabled by the CD's superior storage capabilities in comparison to the dominant medium of cartridges.<br />
<br />
“Standards determine how media reach our senses” (Kittler 36).<br />
<br />
CD-enabled full motion video game software on the Sega CD presented a shift from Sega's arcade roots, requiring that players spent much of their game-time watching video clips and not directly influencing on-screen actions. The Sega CD complicated Sega's already precarious balance between home and arcade game standards by adding an additional conflict between the emerging standards of computer cd-rom gaming and home theatre applications of CD storage technology. <br />
<br />
Without strong standards in place, the new format of CD FMV (full-motion video) games brought grainy video onto the television, heavily letterboxed and thus drawing attention to the “peep show character” (Kittler 223) of its small field of vision.<br />
<br />
The next add-on to hit markets dead-on-arrival was the [[32x]], a cartridge-based peripheral which piggybacked extra processors with the Genesis' original hardware. Released just months before its well-publicized standalone 32-bit CD-based system, the Saturn, however, little attention was paid to 32x by gamers or software developers. Again, lack of adherence to emerging standards concerning the lifecycle of home game consoles produced hardware that did not fit onto the “continuum of experiences” so crucial to Sega's earlier success.<br />
<br />
===Saturn===<br />
<br />
[[File:Egmsept97backcover.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Advertisement for World Series Baseball '98.]]<br />
<br />
Over 1994 and 1995, Sega released its standalone 32-bit system, the [[Sega Saturn]]. Launched with numerous arcade ports and rushed to market in attempt to repeat the Genesis' success at pre-empting competitors, Sega “miscalculated how quickly it [Saturn] would erode demand” for the Genesis. Within a year of Saturn's launch, “Sega of America took huge losses worldwide on warehouses full of unsold 16-bit games” (De Peuter 141).<br />
<br />
Saturn, though more popular than 32x or Sega CD, was still commercially unsuccessful. The system did not launch with a family-friendly franchise title like Sonic the Hedgehog, an affront to increasingly gender- and age- diverse home console audiences.<br />
<br />
However, much as certain filmmakers, reacting against “primacy of women cinemagoers” (Kittler 178) in determining a film's commercial success, originated the “masculine auteur film” (ibid), Sega's in-house software developers produced critically successful games such as NiGHTs into Dreams, a re-imagination of the two-dimensional platform genre in what came to be known as “2.5D” style. Gameplay takes place two axes much like a two-dimensional game, but is presented with from a viewpoint that moves through environments on all three axes.<br />
<br />
By 1998, however, Sega's market share against competitors Nintendo and Sony had dwindled to nine percent (De Peuter 141), as its aggressively masculine products failed to integrate with the changing home console market. Sega ignored the “very empirical” (Kittler 176) evidence of an age- and gender- diverse audience developing around the intersection of television and computer gaming, thus neglecting the era's emergent hybridity with cinematic content and audiences in increasingly general-purpose home theaters.<br />
<br />
=== The Dreamcast ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Dcmnov99p46sonic.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for Sonic Adventure. Sega, Sonic Team, 1999. Note the accusation that readers possess 'lame-ass reflexes'.]]<br />
<br />
In 1999, Sega launched its final home console, the [[Sega Dreamcast]]. Sega's first console to be designed in white rather than black plastic, it appeared initially as though the system could feminize Sega's product line, thus expanding its marketability to family audiences.<br />
<br />
Supporting this first impression, the Dreamcat launched with a family-friendly Sonic franchise game called Sonic Adventure. Sonic Adventure also used the Dreamcast's removable storage/display unit, the “VMU” to distribute a virtual pet minigame, playable on-the-go and similar to a [[Tamagotchi]].<br />
<br />
These apparent concessions to a television-watching living-room market did not carry across most of Dreamcast's other software or promotional materials, however. The system was promoted primarily to “14- to 24-year old dudes” (EGM Sept99 p174) at rock concerts and in inner cities, ostensibly targeting the demographic of “semidelinquent technophile” originally present both in arcades and “at the very origin of gaming's Pentagon-sponsored inception” (De Peuter 91).<br />
<br />
Just before the Dreamcast launched in 1999, Sega of America President Bernie Stolar described his business plan in the following terms:<br />
<br />
“...the next two Christmases for us are to show everyone that Sega is a leading company, and that Sega has the best software in the marketplace” (EGM 174)<br />
<br />
What did not factor into that plan was synergy with home theater hardware-- Sony's PlayStation2, launched in 2000, doubled as a DVD movie player, thus moving closer to what Friedrich Kittler might call a “general medium” (224), and certainly closer to a standard living-room appliance.<br />
<br />
Sega continued to offer primarily arcade ports and auteur games until the Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001.<br />
<br />
== Postmortem ==<br />
<br />
=== Competition, Arcades, and the Internet ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segachannel.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for the Sega Channel, 1995]]<br />
<br />
Sega's home console division displayed considerable reliance upon competitive arcade games and masculine auteur software with obvious military-industrial origins. These offerings came into marketplace conflict with various more effective “public dissimulations” in the business of “mystifying or denying” (De Peuter 181) such origins.<br />
<br />
Despite any qualitative 'gameplay value' present in Sega home products, their competitors' products possessed the symbolic value of rendering video gaming appropriate to a home theater environment. Achieved intertextually through synergy between hardware design, software curation, marketing, and various other actions of “cultural intermediaries” (De Peuter 82). Rather than replacing “the mass consumers in the cinema hall with a single, lonely cybernaut” (Kittler 227) as had been done in their successful arcade and auteur games, Sega's competitors cinematized gaming for a mass audience. Game systems like Microsoft's X-Box and Sony's PlayStation2 added a new dimension of value to their products by providing DVD movie functionality in their machines, further dissimulating their military origins.<br />
<br />
In contrast, Sega undertook a number of costly experiments with online gaming during the lifespan of their home hardware division, attempting to capitalize upon “digital connectivity between many players (usually in their homes) who remain physically separated and isolated” (Burrill 62), enabling a type of dehumanized competitive sociality in a “clear extension of the arcade” (ibid).<br />
<br />
The experiments included [[Sega Channel]], a cable-tv add-on subscription service which provided about 50 Genesis games a month on a premium-channel pay format, and SegaNet, a 56k multiplayer network created in conjunction with AT&T for the Dreamcast. Both were unsuccessful, possibly because they relied on non-standard uses of technology. Sega Channel required extra hardware and a re-purposing of cable TV infrastructure, while SegaNet, despite Sega of America marketing director Charles Bellfield's claims that “There will be no problems on latency issues” (EGM 193), relied upon a [[56k modem]] to connect players over phone lines despite the emerging standards of broadband internet among online gamers.<br />
<br />
The Dreamcast hardware, however, lives on in the form of Sega's NAOMI arcade architecture, one of the most long-living arcade systems in history. Sega continues to produce both arcade and home software despite the defunctness of its home hardware division.<br />
<br />
=== Emulation ===<br />
<br />
Because Sega's home hardware systems have all been discontinued, very little software remains in print to accompany them. This presents numerous difficulties to enthusiasts, researchers and historians hoping to play them. The majority of activity concerning discontinued software and hardware for Sega's home systems happens through unofficial homebrew releases and emulators.<br />
<br />
By creating unlicensed software and emulators themselves, enthusiast “antiheros” demonstrate the skills and tools necessary to be “productive of [themselves]” (Burrill 124), becoming “the code, the coder and the decoder” (ibid)-- re-creating the hardware environments which created their identities through play in the past, re-articulating a new set of values in each new context of time or operating environment that the games are able to enter through emulation. <br />
<br />
In 2006, Sega began offering official emulations of certain 'classic' games through the online Wii Virtual Console (Parish np)-- completing a circuit between arcades, Sega home consoles, masculine enthusiast-tinkerers and the “General Medium” of a broadband-enabled home console.<br />
<br />
== Works Cited ==<br />
<br />
Burrill, Derek A. "Die Tryin': Video Games, Masculinity, Culture", 2008. Peter Lang, New York.<br />
<br />
DeMaria, Rusel and Johnny L. Wilson. "High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games", 2002. McGraw Hill/Osborne, Berkeley CA.<br />
<br />
De Peuter, Greig, Stephen Kline and Nick Dyer-Witheford. "Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing", 2003. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal QC.<br />
<br />
"It's Here, But Should You Buy One?" Electronic Gaming Monthly, September 1999. p168-175.<br />
<br />
Kittler, Friedrich. "Optical Media", 2010. Polity Press, Malden MA.<br />
<br />
Kohler, Chris. "Playing the SG-1000, Sega's First Game Machine". http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/10/sega-sg-1000/. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
Parish, Jeremy. "The Best Virtual Console Wii Games". http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3154803. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Fall 2010]] [[Category:Video Games]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Home_Video_Game_Consoles&diff=11755Sega Home Video Game Consoles2010-11-14T00:55:39Z<p>Jah450: /* Saturn */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Rez_ingame.jpg|right|thumb|300pix|Screenshot from "REZ", Sonic Team/Sega 2001.]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Sega Enterprises, LTD released five standalone home video game systems between 1983 and 1999, all of which are currently discontinued. The aim of this dossier is not provide an exhaustive analysis of all Sega's dead media platforms, but rather to provide an overview of the company's home console division which serves as a portal for further investigation of its specific products. This dossier is concerned in particular with tracing the causes of Sega home systems' death and its relation to the ongoing negotiation between video games' military and arcade oriented genealogy as they adapt to domestic settings. <br />
<br />
In addition, this survey of Sega's large and obsolete body of products is an attempt to promote the archival and investigation of various obsolete video game technologies' historical importance to developing standards in the production, distribution, and experience of media technologies.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Origins ==<br />
<br />
=== Service Games: a Military-Industrial Entertainment Business ===<br />
<br />
The origins of Sega home video game consoles can be traced to David Rosen, a U.S. Air Force veteran who had been stationed in Japan. He began “a company in Japan named Rosen Enterprises that imported pinball machines as entertainment from the US” (De Peuter 91) after World War II. Rosen Enterprises merged with another American/Japanese amusement company in 1965 called Service Games.<br />
<br />
After merging, Service Games's name was shortened to Sega. In 1967, the company began producing its own mechanical arcade games for placement in Sega brand arcade locations around Japan.<br />
<br />
=== Arcade Gaming ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Altbeastplay.png|right|400pix|thumb|"Altered Beast" arcade screenshot. Sega, 1988.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:SpaceHarrier_arcadeflyer.png|right|400pix|thumb|Promotional flier for "Space Harrier". Sega AM2, 1985.]]<br />
<br />
Sega progenitor David Rosen recalls of early Sega arcade games: “The first game we built was Rifleman. Our first big hit was Periscope … From 1967 through 1979 we manufactured 140 different games” (DeMaria 233). Sega's earliest original productions played upon a number of militant and masculine tropes, including what media theorist Friedrich Kittler calls “structural correspondence between perspective and ballistics” (186).<br />
<br />
Cinematized representations of gunplay and marksmanship, popularized and formalized in wartime film, create “intertextual representative experiences”-- in this case “predicated on the player having existing knowledge … of how this specific type of action/spy hero masculinity is 'supposed' to operate” (Burrill 1), which includes aiming and firing weapons, identifying enemies, and basic visual familiarity with military machinery.<br />
<br />
Tapping into the culture of competition and masculinity inherited from the armed forces, Sega rooted its business model in facilitating “feats of strength and skill based on pain and violence” which produced and reproduced “male codes of power” (Burrill 6) in arcades. This militant approach to gaming was maintained throughout Sega's arcade and home offerings through the end of the 20th century.<br />
<br />
Doug Glen, Sega's VP of Business Development and Strategic Planning in the 1990's, described their business model in the following terms: <br />
<br />
“We look at it as a continuum of experience. You can leverage the asset from the highest end down to the mass market-- the home. We get into the leading edge and nurture the experience throughout the various manifestations” (De Peuter 137)<br />
<br />
For Sega, arcades constituted the 'leading edge' or 'highest end', while home systems provided an extension of the arcade experience for home markets. This emphasis on arcades and the audiences of “semidelinquent technophile” (Burrill 7) they catered to prevented Sega from developing home consoles and software that could gain popularity with domestic audiences of varied gender and taste. <br />
<br />
=== Sega SG-1000 & Sega Master System ===<br />
<br />
Sega released its first home video game console, the [[SG-1000]] in Japan on the same day in 1983 that Nintendo launched its FamiCom (short for “Family Computer”, marketed in the US as [[Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)]]. The SG-1000 was never released outside of Asia, where numerous third-party add-ons of dubious legality enabled it to play games for competing Colecovision and Atari 2600 systems (Kohler np).<br />
<br />
The system architecture was cloned and re-released by multiple companies beside Sega. The SG-1000's software and marketing were primarily concerned with re-mediating prior games and consoles, and the revenue from hardware sales was split between Sega and multiple other manufacturers. This lack of quality control was not unique to Sega and is widely credited with causing a video game industry crash in 1984.<br />
<br />
In 1985, Sega released the [[Sega Master System]], an 8-bit system designed to compete more effectively with Nintendo's NES. David Rosen recalls: <br />
<br />
*“after the game market collapse [in 1984]… the industry was fairly well written off. We had a product in the pipeline, but we had put it on the shelf. We took it off the shelf when we saw what was happening with Nintendo. But we were a year behind Nintendo and that was a very difficult hurdle to overcome” (DeMaria 234).<br />
<br />
The Sega Master System did not achieve notable success in Sega's primary markets (Japan and North America). It did, however, become popular in secondary markets, most notably Brazil and Europe, where consumers were less exposed to competing products. The possibility of marketing to underserved populations was thus revealed, and Sega repeated this approach, in certain ways, with its next console.<br />
<br />
== The 1990's ==<br />
<br />
===Genesis/Megadrive===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segacd32x.jpg|thumb|200pix|right|Fig. 2. A 2nd generation Sega Mega Drive with Mega CD and 32x attachments.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:Sonic1_box_usa.jpg|thumb|100pix|right|US packaging art for "Sonic the Hedgehog"]]<br />
<br />
<br />
“...initial NES players had gotten older and entered their teens. Their systems ended up in closets. They discovered girls. So we positioned Genesis as the product you graduated to. Once you put away your toys, you got Sega. And we gave them arcade games and sports” – Al Nilson, Sega of America Director of Marketing on launching the Genesis/Megadrive. (DeMaria 244)<br />
<br />
Between 1988 and 1989 Sega rolled out a 16-bit system in North America, Japan, and Europe. It was marketed as [[Sega Genesis]] in North America and Sega Mega Drive elsewhere. The system launched with ports of popular Sega arcade games like Golden Axe and Altered Beast, despite the fact that it “Looked like devil worship in the midwest” (DeMaria 247), according to Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske.<br />
<br />
The competitive games ported from Sega's arcade machines effectively provided “a sphere for bodily action as well as one in which the subject [could] fight off the looming threat of absent technologies” (Burrill 6), including home video games and computers, which recontextualized video gaming's arcade and military origins through “concealment, intimacy, [and] internalization” (Burril 3) in a mass-market domestic product. The Genesis is an example of domesticated technology providing a way for users to perform feats of power with military origins in the home, enabled by mass-market home television sets.<br />
<br />
With the Genesis, Sega helped usher in an era of 'console wars' against Nintendo. In order to compete with Nintendo's entrenched dominance in the home market, Sega produced home software that would expand upon the “Platform” genre of games defined by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers. These “cutesy jump 'n run games”, contain “a wide mix of gameplay elements” and include “identifiable characters and heroes”, thus deflecting some of the “controversy associated with more violent and disturbing game genres” (De Peuter 117) popular in arcades.<br />
<br />
Sega's character-driven platform game Sonic the Hedgehog, launched with the Genesis, featured a cartoon protagonist reminiscent of Bart Simpson and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, already popular with children and families on television. Simultaneously, Sonic the Hedgehog enabled players to navigate levels at a much higher speed than prior platform games, expanding the possibility for arcade-style displays of reflexes and prowess in home software.<br />
<br />
This two-tiered approach to software combined appeals to both military-industrial and domesticated video game tastes, though it leaned heavily on Sega's past in the military entertainment business. The Genesis hardware and marketing thereof was also thoroughly steeped in the culture of aggression that characterized Sega's entrepreneurial, arcade, and military origins. <br />
<br />
Because of the Nintendo NES's position of dominance in the home console marketplace of 1988, the company was “reluctant to innovate and vulnerable to being technologically leapfrogged” (De Peuter 129). Sega “followed the logic of the perpetual innovation economy” (ibid), engineering a console which could more faithfully reproduce the graphics of both arcade games and cartoon heroes than its competitors. <br />
<br />
Reliance on this type of blitzkrieg development toward new technological standards, a holdover from Sega's origins within the military-industrial economy, was a significant and recurring theme throughout the life cycle of their home hardware endeavors, contributing to their difficulty adapting to a rapidly domesticating home game market. <br />
<br />
==== Sega CD and 32x ====<br />
<br />
[[File:Night_Trap_Cover.jpg|right|thumb|US Box art for Night Trap. Digital Pictures/Sega 1992.]]<br />
<br />
The first suggestions that Sega was too aggressively masculine to continue its success in the home market arrived in the form of add-on hardware for the Genesis. The [[Sega CD]] (Mega CD in Europe and Japan), released in different markets between 1991 and 1993, was the second compact disc based home system commercially available. Most of its software relied heavily on digitized video of live actors, enabled by the CD's superior storage capabilities in comparison to the dominant medium of cartridges.<br />
<br />
“Standards determine how media reach our senses” (Kittler 36).<br />
<br />
CD-enabled full motion video game software on the Sega CD presented a shift from Sega's arcade roots, requiring that players spent much of their game-time watching video clips and not directly influencing on-screen actions. The Sega CD complicated Sega's already precarious balance between home and arcade game standards by adding an additional conflict between the emerging standards of computer cd-rom gaming and home theatre applications of CD storage technology. <br />
<br />
Without strong standards in place, the new format of CD FMV (full-motion video) games brought grainy video onto the television, heavily letterboxed and thus drawing attention to the “peep show character” (Kittler 223) of its small field of vision.<br />
<br />
The next add-on to hit markets dead-on-arrival was the [[32x]], a cartridge-based peripheral which piggybacked extra processors with the Genesis' original hardware. Released just months before its well-publicized standalone 32-bit CD-based system, the Saturn, however, little attention was paid to 32x by gamers or software developers. Again, lack of adherence to emerging standards concerning the lifecycle of home game consoles produced hardware that did not fit onto the “continuum of experiences” so crucial to Sega's earlier success.<br />
<br />
===Saturn===<br />
<br />
[[File:Egmsept97backcover.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Advertisement for World Series Baseball '98.]]<br />
<br />
Over 1994 and 1995, Sega released its standalone 32-bit system, the [[Sega Saturn]]. Launched with numerous arcade ports and rushed to market in attempt to repeat the Genesis' success at pre-empting competitors, Sega “miscalculated how quickly it [Saturn] would erode demand” for the Genesis. Within a year of Saturn's launch, “Sega of America took huge losses worldwide on warehouses full of unsold 16-bit games” (De Peuter 141).<br />
<br />
Saturn, though more popular than 32x or Sega CD, was still commercially unsuccessful. The system did not launch with a family-friendly franchise title like Sonic the Hedgehog, an affront to increasingly gender- and age- diverse home console audiences.<br />
<br />
However, much as certain filmmakers, reacting against “primacy of women cinemagoers” (Kittler 178) in determining a film's commercial success, originated the “masculine auteur film” (ibid), Sega's in-house software developers produced critically successful games such as NiGHTs into Dreams, a re-imagination of the two-dimensional platform genre in what came to be known as “2.5D” style. Gameplay takes place two axes much like a two-dimensional game, but is presented with from a viewpoint that moves through environments on all three axes.<br />
<br />
By 1998, however, Sega's market share against competitors Nintendo and Sony had dwindled to nine percent (De Peuter 141), as its aggressively masculine products failed to integrate with the changing home console market. Sega ignored the “very empirical” (Kittler 176) evidence of an age- and gender- diverse audience developing around the intersection of television and computer gaming, thus neglecting the era's emergent hybridity with cinematic content and audiences in increasingly general-purpose home theaters.<br />
<br />
=== The Dreamcast ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Dcmnov99p46sonic.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for Sonic Adventure. Sega, Sonic Team, 1999. Note the accusation that readers possess 'lame-ass reflexes'.]]<br />
<br />
In 1999, Sega launched its final home console, the [[Sega Dreamcast]]. Sega's first console to be designed in white rather than black plastic, it appeared initially as though the system could feminize Sega's product line, thus expanding its marketability to family audiences.<br />
<br />
Supporting this first impression, the Dreamcat launched with a family-friendly Sonic franchise game called Sonic Adventure. Sonic Adventure also used the Dreamcast's removable storage/display unit, the “VMU” to distribute a virtual pet minigame, playable on-the-go and similar to a [[Tamagotchi]].<br />
<br />
These apparent concessions to a television-watching living-room market did not carry across most of Dreamcast's other software or promotional materials, however. The system was promoted primarily to “14- to 24-year old dudes” (EGM Sept99 p174) at rock concerts and in inner cities, ostensibly targeting the demographic of “semidelinquent technophile” originally present both in arcades and “at the very origin of gaming's Pentagon-sponsored inception” (De Peuter 91).<br />
<br />
Just before the Dreamcast launched in 1999, Sega of America President Bernie Stolar described his business plan in the following terms:<br />
<br />
“...the next two Christmases for us are to show everyone that Sega is a leading company, and that Sega has the best software in the marketplace” (EGM 174)<br />
<br />
What did not factor into that plan was synergy with home theater hardware-- Sony's PlayStation2, launched in 2000, doubled as a DVD movie player, thus moving closer to what Friedrich Kittler might call a “general medium” (224), and certainly closer to a standard living-room appliance.<br />
<br />
Sega continued to offer primarily arcade ports and auteur games until the Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001.<br />
<br />
== Postmortem ==<br />
<br />
=== Competition, Arcades, and the Internet ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segachannel.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for the Sega Channel, 1995]]<br />
<br />
Sega's home console division displayed considerable reliance upon competitive arcade games and masculine auteur software with obvious military-industrial origins. These offerings came into marketplace conflict with various more effective “public dissimulations” in the business of “mystifying or denying” (De Peuter 181) such origins.<br />
<br />
Despite any qualitative 'gameplay value' present in Sega home products, their competitors' products possessed the symbolic value of rendering video gaming appropriate to a home theater environment. Achieved intertextually through synergy between hardware design, software curation, marketing, and various other actions of “cultural intermediaries” (De Peuter 82). Rather than replacing “the mass consumers in the cinema hall with a single, lonely cybernaut” (Kittler 227) as had been done in their successful arcade and auteur games, Sega's competitors cinematized gaming for a mass audience. Game systems like Microsoft's X-Box and Sony's PlayStation2 added a new dimension of value to their products by providing DVD movie functionality in their machines, further dissimulating their military origins.<br />
<br />
In contrast, Sega undertook a number of costly experiments with online gaming during the lifespan of their home hardware division, attempting to capitalize upon “digital connectivity between many players (usually in their homes) who remain physically separated and isolated” (Burrill 62), enabling a type of dehumanized competitive sociality in a “clear extension of the arcade” (ibid).<br />
<br />
The experiments included [[Sega Channel]], a cable-tv add-on subscription service which provided about 50 Genesis games a month on a premium-channel pay format, and SegaNet, a 56k multiplayer network created in conjunction with AT&T for the Dreamcast. Both were unsuccessful, possibly because they relied on non-standard uses of technology. Sega Channel required extra hardware and a re-purposing of cable TV infrastructure, while SegaNet, despite Sega of America marketing director Charles Bellfield's claims that “There will be no problems on latency issues” (EGM 193), relied upon a [[56k modem]] to connect players over phone lines despite the emerging standards of broadband internet among online gamers.<br />
<br />
The Dreamcast hardware, however, lives on in the form of Sega's NAOMI arcade architecture, one of the most long-living arcade systems in history. Sega continues to produce both arcade and home software despite the defunctness of its home hardware division.<br />
<br />
=== Emulation ===<br />
<br />
Because Sega's home hardware systems have all been discontinued, very little software remains in print to accompany them. This presents numerous difficulties to enthusiasts, researchers and historians hoping to play them. The majority of activity concerning discontinued software and hardware for Sega's home systems happens through unofficial homebrew releases and emulators.<br />
<br />
The semidelinquent “antiheros” of video game history, have also developed the skills and tools necessary to be “productive of [themselves]” (Burrill 124), becoming “the code, the coder and the decoder” (ibid). Communities of enthusiasts began producing Dreamcast programs capable of running other home console games and new unofficial software releases before it was even discontinued, and numerous emulation projects that run on home computers existed even earlier.<br />
<br />
In 2006, Sega began offering official emulations of certain 'classic' games through the online Wii Virtual Console (Parish np)-- completing a circuit between arcades, Sega home consoles, masculine enthusiast-tinkerers and the “General Medium” of a broadband-enabled home console.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Works Cited ==<br />
<br />
Burrill, Derek A. "Die Tryin': Video Games, Masculinity, Culture", 2008. Peter Lang, New York.<br />
<br />
DeMaria, Rusel and Johnny L. Wilson. "High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games", 2002. McGraw Hill/Osborne, Berkeley CA.<br />
<br />
De Peuter, Greig, Stephen Kline and Nick Dyer-Witheford. "Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing", 2003. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal QC.<br />
<br />
"It's Here, But Should You Buy One?" Electronic Gaming Monthly, September 1999. p168-175.<br />
<br />
Kittler, Friedrich. "Optical Media", 2010. Polity Press, Malden MA.<br />
<br />
Kohler, Chris. "Playing the SG-1000, Sega's First Game Machine". http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/10/sega-sg-1000/. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
Parish, Jeremy. "The Best Virtual Console Wii Games". http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3154803. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Fall 2010]] [[Category:Video Games]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Home_Video_Game_Consoles&diff=11752Sega Home Video Game Consoles2010-11-14T00:48:39Z<p>Jah450: /* Competition, Arcades, and the Internet */</p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Rez_ingame.jpg|right|thumb|300pix|Screenshot from "REZ", Sonic Team/Sega 2001.]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Sega Enterprises, LTD released five standalone home video game systems between 1983 and 1999, all of which are currently discontinued. The aim of this dossier is not provide an exhaustive analysis of all Sega's dead media platforms, but rather to provide an overview of the company's home console division which serves as a portal for further investigation of its specific products. This dossier is concerned in particular with tracing the causes of Sega home systems' death and its relation to the ongoing negotiation between video games' military and arcade oriented genealogy as they adapt to domestic settings. <br />
<br />
In addition, this survey of Sega's large and obsolete body of products is an attempt to promote the archival and investigation of various obsolete video game technologies' historical importance to developing standards in the production, distribution, and experience of media technologies.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Origins ==<br />
<br />
=== Service Games: a Military-Industrial Entertainment Business ===<br />
<br />
The origins of Sega home video game consoles can be traced to David Rosen, a U.S. Air Force veteran who had been stationed in Japan. He began “a company in Japan named Rosen Enterprises that imported pinball machines as entertainment from the US” (De Peuter 91) after World War II. Rosen Enterprises merged with another American/Japanese amusement company in 1965 called Service Games.<br />
<br />
After merging, Service Games's name was shortened to Sega. In 1967, the company began producing its own mechanical arcade games for placement in Sega brand arcade locations around Japan.<br />
<br />
=== Arcade Gaming ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Altbeastplay.png|right|400pix|thumb|"Altered Beast" arcade screenshot. Sega, 1988.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:SpaceHarrier_arcadeflyer.png|right|400pix|thumb|Promotional flier for "Space Harrier". Sega AM2, 1985.]]<br />
<br />
Sega progenitor David Rosen recalls of early Sega arcade games: “The first game we built was Rifleman. Our first big hit was Periscope … From 1967 through 1979 we manufactured 140 different games” (DeMaria 233). Sega's earliest original productions played upon a number of militant and masculine tropes, including what media theorist Friedrich Kittler calls “structural correspondence between perspective and ballistics” (186).<br />
<br />
Cinematized representations of gunplay and marksmanship, popularized and formalized in wartime film, create “intertextual representative experiences”-- in this case “predicated on the player having existing knowledge … of how this specific type of action/spy hero masculinity is 'supposed' to operate” (Burrill 1), which includes aiming and firing weapons, identifying enemies, and basic visual familiarity with military machinery.<br />
<br />
Tapping into the culture of competition and masculinity inherited from the armed forces, Sega rooted its business model in facilitating “feats of strength and skill based on pain and violence” which produced and reproduced “male codes of power” (Burrill 6) in arcades. This militant approach to gaming was maintained throughout Sega's arcade and home offerings through the end of the 20th century.<br />
<br />
Doug Glen, Sega's VP of Business Development and Strategic Planning in the 1990's, described their business model in the following terms: <br />
<br />
“We look at it as a continuum of experience. You can leverage the asset from the highest end down to the mass market-- the home. We get into the leading edge and nurture the experience throughout the various manifestations” (De Peuter 137)<br />
<br />
For Sega, arcades constituted the 'leading edge' or 'highest end', while home systems provided an extension of the arcade experience for home markets. This emphasis on arcades and the audiences of “semidelinquent technophile” (Burrill 7) they catered to prevented Sega from developing home consoles and software that could gain popularity with domestic audiences of varied gender and taste. <br />
<br />
=== Sega SG-1000 & Sega Master System ===<br />
<br />
Sega released its first home video game console, the [[SG-1000]] in Japan on the same day in 1983 that Nintendo launched its FamiCom (short for “Family Computer”, marketed in the US as [[Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)]]. The SG-1000 was never released outside of Asia, where numerous third-party add-ons of dubious legality enabled it to play games for competing Colecovision and Atari 2600 systems (Kohler np).<br />
<br />
The system architecture was cloned and re-released by multiple companies beside Sega. The SG-1000's software and marketing were primarily concerned with re-mediating prior games and consoles, and the revenue from hardware sales was split between Sega and multiple other manufacturers. This lack of quality control was not unique to Sega and is widely credited with causing a video game industry crash in 1984.<br />
<br />
In 1985, Sega released the [[Sega Master System]], an 8-bit system designed to compete more effectively with Nintendo's NES. David Rosen recalls: <br />
<br />
*“after the game market collapse [in 1984]… the industry was fairly well written off. We had a product in the pipeline, but we had put it on the shelf. We took it off the shelf when we saw what was happening with Nintendo. But we were a year behind Nintendo and that was a very difficult hurdle to overcome” (DeMaria 234).<br />
<br />
The Sega Master System did not achieve notable success in Sega's primary markets (Japan and North America). It did, however, become popular in secondary markets, most notably Brazil and Europe, where consumers were less exposed to competing products. The possibility of marketing to underserved populations was thus revealed, and Sega repeated this approach, in certain ways, with its next console.<br />
<br />
== The 1990's ==<br />
<br />
===Genesis/Megadrive===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segacd32x.jpg|thumb|200pix|right|Fig. 2. A 2nd generation Sega Mega Drive with Mega CD and 32x attachments.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:Sonic1_box_usa.jpg|thumb|100pix|right|US packaging art for "Sonic the Hedgehog"]]<br />
<br />
<br />
“...initial NES players had gotten older and entered their teens. Their systems ended up in closets. They discovered girls. So we positioned Genesis as the product you graduated to. Once you put away your toys, you got Sega. And we gave them arcade games and sports” – Al Nilson, Sega of America Director of Marketing on launching the Genesis/Megadrive. (DeMaria 244)<br />
<br />
Between 1988 and 1989 Sega rolled out a 16-bit system in North America, Japan, and Europe. It was marketed as [[Sega Genesis]] in North America and Sega Mega Drive elsewhere. The system launched with ports of popular Sega arcade games like Golden Axe and Altered Beast, despite the fact that it “Looked like devil worship in the midwest” (DeMaria 247), according to Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske.<br />
<br />
The competitive games ported from Sega's arcade machines effectively provided “a sphere for bodily action as well as one in which the subject [could] fight off the looming threat of absent technologies” (Burrill 6), including home video games and computers, which recontextualized video gaming's arcade and military origins through “concealment, intimacy, [and] internalization” (Burril 3) in a mass-market domestic product. The Genesis is an example of domesticated technology providing a way for users to perform feats of power with military origins in the home, enabled by mass-market home television sets.<br />
<br />
With the Genesis, Sega helped usher in an era of 'console wars' against Nintendo. In order to compete with Nintendo's entrenched dominance in the home market, Sega produced home software that would expand upon the “Platform” genre of games defined by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers. These “cutesy jump 'n run games”, contain “a wide mix of gameplay elements” and include “identifiable characters and heroes”, thus deflecting some of the “controversy associated with more violent and disturbing game genres” (De Peuter 117) popular in arcades.<br />
<br />
Sega's character-driven platform game Sonic the Hedgehog, launched with the Genesis, featured a cartoon protagonist reminiscent of Bart Simpson and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, already popular with children and families on television. Simultaneously, Sonic the Hedgehog enabled players to navigate levels at a much higher speed than prior platform games, expanding the possibility for arcade-style displays of reflexes and prowess in home software.<br />
<br />
This two-tiered approach to software combined appeals to both military-industrial and domesticated video game tastes, though it leaned heavily on Sega's past in the military entertainment business. The Genesis hardware and marketing thereof was also thoroughly steeped in the culture of aggression that characterized Sega's entrepreneurial, arcade, and military origins. <br />
<br />
Because of the Nintendo NES's position of dominance in the home console marketplace of 1988, the company was “reluctant to innovate and vulnerable to being technologically leapfrogged” (De Peuter 129). Sega “followed the logic of the perpetual innovation economy” (ibid), engineering a console which could more faithfully reproduce the graphics of both arcade games and cartoon heroes than its competitors. <br />
<br />
Reliance on this type of blitzkrieg development toward new technological standards, a holdover from Sega's origins within the military-industrial economy, was a significant and recurring theme throughout the life cycle of their home hardware endeavors, contributing to their difficulty adapting to a rapidly domesticating home game market. <br />
<br />
==== Sega CD and 32x ====<br />
<br />
[[File:Night_Trap_Cover.jpg|right|thumb|US Box art for Night Trap. Digital Pictures/Sega 1992.]]<br />
<br />
The first suggestions that Sega was too aggressively masculine to continue its success in the home market arrived in the form of add-on hardware for the Genesis. The [[Sega CD]] (Mega CD in Europe and Japan), released in different markets between 1991 and 1993, was the second compact disc based home system commercially available. Most of its software relied heavily on digitized video of live actors, enabled by the CD's superior storage capabilities in comparison to the dominant medium of cartridges.<br />
<br />
“Standards determine how media reach our senses” (Kittler 36).<br />
<br />
CD-enabled full motion video game software on the Sega CD presented a shift from Sega's arcade roots, requiring that players spent much of their game-time watching video clips and not directly influencing on-screen actions. The Sega CD complicated Sega's already precarious balance between home and arcade game standards by adding an additional conflict between the emerging standards of computer cd-rom gaming and home theatre applications of CD storage technology. <br />
<br />
Without strong standards in place, the new format of CD FMV (full-motion video) games brought grainy video onto the television, heavily letterboxed and thus drawing attention to the “peep show character” (Kittler 223) of its small field of vision.<br />
<br />
The next add-on to hit markets dead-on-arrival was the [[32x]], a cartridge-based peripheral which piggybacked extra processors with the Genesis' original hardware. Released just months before its well-publicized standalone 32-bit CD-based system, the Saturn, however, little attention was paid to 32x by gamers or software developers. Again, lack of adherence to emerging standards concerning the lifecycle of home game consoles produced hardware that did not fit onto the “continuum of experiences” so crucial to Sega's earlier success.<br />
<br />
===Saturn===<br />
<br />
[[File:Egmsept97backcover.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Advertisement for World Series Baseball '98.]]<br />
<br />
Over 1994 and 1995, Sega released its standalone 32-bit system, the [[Sega Saturn]]. Launched with numerous arcade ports and rushed to market in attempt to repeat the Genesis' success at pre-empting competitors, Sega “miscalculated how quickly it [Saturn] would erode demand” for the Genesis. Within a year of Saturn's launch, “Sega of America took huge losses worldwide on warehouses full of unsold 16-bit games” (De Peuter 141).<br />
<br />
Saturn, though more popular than 32x or Sega CD, was still commercially unsuccessful. The system did not launch with a family-friendly franchise title like Sonic the Hedgehog, effectively ignoring gender and age diversity of home console consumers.<br />
<br />
However, much as certain filmmakers, reacting against “primacy of women cinemagoers” (Kittler 178) in determining a film's commercial success, originated the “masculine auteur film” (ibid), Sega's in-house software developers produced critically successful games such as NiGHTs into Dreams, a re-imagination of the two-dimensional platform genre in what came to be known as “2.5D” style. Gameplay takes place two axes much like a two-dimensional game, but is presented with from a viewpoint that moves through environments on all three axes. <br />
<br />
By 1998, however, Sega's market share against competitors Nintendo and Sony had dwindled to nine percent (De Peuter 141), as its aggressively masculine products failed to integrate with the changing home console market. Sega ignored the “very empirical” (Kittler 176) evidence of an age- and gender- diverse audience developing around the intersection of television and computer gaming, thus neglecting the era's emergent hybridity with cinematic content and audiences in increasingly general-purpose home theaters.<br />
<br />
=== The Dreamcast ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Dcmnov99p46sonic.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for Sonic Adventure. Sega, Sonic Team, 1999. Note the accusation that readers possess 'lame-ass reflexes'.]]<br />
<br />
In 1999, Sega launched its final home console, the [[Sega Dreamcast]]. Sega's first console to be designed in white rather than black plastic, it appeared initially as though the system could feminize Sega's product line, thus expanding its marketability to family audiences.<br />
<br />
Supporting this first impression, the Dreamcat launched with a family-friendly Sonic franchise game called Sonic Adventure. Sonic Adventure also used the Dreamcast's removable storage/display unit, the “VMU” to distribute a virtual pet minigame, playable on-the-go and similar to a [[Tamagotchi]].<br />
<br />
These apparent concessions to a television-watching living-room market did not carry across most of Dreamcast's other software or promotional materials, however. The system was promoted primarily to “14- to 24-year old dudes” (EGM Sept99 p174) at rock concerts and in inner cities, ostensibly targeting the demographic of “semidelinquent technophile” originally present both in arcades and “at the very origin of gaming's Pentagon-sponsored inception” (De Peuter 91).<br />
<br />
Just before the Dreamcast launched in 1999, Sega of America President Bernie Stolar described his business plan in the following terms:<br />
<br />
“...the next two Christmases for us are to show everyone that Sega is a leading company, and that Sega has the best software in the marketplace” (EGM 174)<br />
<br />
What did not factor into that plan was synergy with home theater hardware-- Sony's PlayStation2, launched in 2000, doubled as a DVD movie player, thus moving closer to what Friedrich Kittler might call a “general medium” (224), and certainly closer to a standard living-room appliance.<br />
<br />
Sega continued to offer primarily arcade ports and auteur games until the Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001.<br />
<br />
== Postmortem ==<br />
<br />
=== Competition, Arcades, and the Internet ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segachannel.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for the Sega Channel, 1995]]<br />
<br />
Sega's home console division displayed considerable reliance upon competitive arcade games and masculine auteur software with obvious military-industrial origins. These offerings came into marketplace conflict with various more effective “public dissimulations” in the business of “mystifying or denying” (De Peuter 181) such origins.<br />
<br />
Despite any qualitative 'gameplay value' present in Sega home products, their competitors' products possessed the symbolic value of rendering video gaming appropriate to a home theater environment. Achieved intertextually through synergy between hardware design, software curation, marketing, and various other actions of “cultural intermediaries” (De Peuter 82). Rather than replacing “the mass consumers in the cinema hall with a single, lonely cybernaut” (Kittler 227) as had been done in their successful arcade and auteur games, Sega's competitors cinematized gaming for a mass audience. Game systems like Microsoft's X-Box and Sony's PlayStation2 added a new dimension of value to their products by providing DVD movie functionality in their machines, further dissimulating their military origins.<br />
<br />
In contrast, Sega undertook a number of costly experiments with online gaming during the lifespan of their home hardware division, attempting to capitalize upon “digital connectivity between many players (usually in their homes) who remain physically separated and isolated” (Burrill 62), enabling a type of dehumanized competitive sociality in a “clear extension of the arcade” (ibid).<br />
<br />
The experiments included [[Sega Channel]], a cable-tv add-on subscription service which provided about 50 Genesis games a month on a premium-channel pay format, and SegaNet, a 56k multiplayer network created in conjunction with AT&T for the Dreamcast. Both were unsuccessful, possibly because they relied on non-standard uses of technology. Sega Channel required extra hardware and a re-purposing of cable TV infrastructure, while SegaNet, despite Sega of America marketing director Charles Bellfield's claims that “There will be no problems on latency issues” (EGM 193), relied upon a [[56k modem]] to connect players over phone lines despite the emerging standards of broadband internet among online gamers.<br />
<br />
The Dreamcast hardware, however, lives on in the form of Sega's NAOMI arcade architecture, one of the most long-living arcade systems in history. Sega continues to produce both arcade and home software despite the defunctness of its home hardware division.<br />
<br />
=== Emulation ===<br />
<br />
Because Sega's home hardware systems have all been discontinued, very little software remains in print to accompany them. This presents numerous difficulties to enthusiasts, researchers and historians hoping to play them. The majority of activity concerning discontinued software and hardware for Sega's home systems happens through unofficial homebrew releases and emulators.<br />
<br />
The semidelinquent “antiheros” of video game history, have also developed the skills and tools necessary to be “productive of [themselves]” (Burrill 124), becoming “the code, the coder and the decoder” (ibid). Communities of enthusiasts began producing Dreamcast programs capable of running other home console games and new unofficial software releases before it was even discontinued, and numerous emulation projects that run on home computers existed even earlier.<br />
<br />
In 2006, Sega began offering official emulations of certain 'classic' games through the online Wii Virtual Console (Parish np)-- completing a circuit between arcades, Sega home consoles, masculine enthusiast-tinkerers and the “General Medium” of a broadband-enabled home console.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Works Cited ==<br />
<br />
Burrill, Derek A. "Die Tryin': Video Games, Masculinity, Culture", 2008. Peter Lang, New York.<br />
<br />
DeMaria, Rusel and Johnny L. Wilson. "High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games", 2002. McGraw Hill/Osborne, Berkeley CA.<br />
<br />
De Peuter, Greig, Stephen Kline and Nick Dyer-Witheford. "Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing", 2003. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal QC.<br />
<br />
"It's Here, But Should You Buy One?" Electronic Gaming Monthly, September 1999. p168-175.<br />
<br />
Kittler, Friedrich. "Optical Media", 2010. Polity Press, Malden MA.<br />
<br />
Kohler, Chris. "Playing the SG-1000, Sega's First Game Machine". http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/10/sega-sg-1000/. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
Parish, Jeremy. "The Best Virtual Console Wii Games". http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3154803. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Fall 2010]] [[Category:Video Games]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=56k_modem&diff=1175156k modem2010-11-13T23:34:39Z<p>Jah450: Created page with 'Sorry, this dossier does not exist yet. It is a 'Proposed Dossier". Category:Proposed_Dossier'</p>
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[[Category:Proposed_Dossier]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Channel&diff=11750Sega Channel2010-11-13T23:34:32Z<p>Jah450: Created page with 'Sorry, this dossier does not exist yet. It is a 'Proposed Dossier". Category:Proposed_Dossier'</p>
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[[Category:Proposed_Dossier]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Saturn&diff=11749Sega Saturn2010-11-13T23:34:15Z<p>Jah450: Created page with 'Sorry, this dossier does not exist yet. It is a 'Proposed Dossier". Category:Proposed_Dossier'</p>
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[[Category:Proposed_Dossier]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=32x&diff=1174832x2010-11-13T23:34:07Z<p>Jah450: Created page with 'Sorry, this dossier does not exist yet. It is a 'Proposed Dossier". Category:Proposed_Dossier'</p>
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[[Category:Proposed_Dossier]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_CD&diff=11747Sega CD2010-11-13T23:33:58Z<p>Jah450: Created page with 'Sorry, this dossier does not exist yet. It is a 'Proposed Dossier". Category:Proposed_Dossier'</p>
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[[Category:Proposed_Dossier]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Genesis&diff=11746Sega Genesis2010-11-13T23:33:49Z<p>Jah450: Created page with 'Sorry, this dossier does not exist yet. It is a 'Proposed Dossier". Category:Proposed_Dossier'</p>
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[[Category:Proposed_Dossier]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Master_System&diff=11745Sega Master System2010-11-13T23:33:39Z<p>Jah450: Created page with 'Sorry, this dossier does not exist yet. It is a 'Proposed Dossier". Category:Proposed_Dossier'</p>
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[[Category:Proposed_Dossier]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Nintendo_Entertainment_System_(NES)&diff=11744Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)2010-11-13T23:33:32Z<p>Jah450: Created page with 'Sorry, this dossier does not exist yet. It is a 'Proposed Dossier". Category:Proposed_Dossier'</p>
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[[Category:Proposed_Dossier]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=SG-1000&diff=11743SG-10002010-11-13T23:33:16Z<p>Jah450: </p>
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[[Category:Proposed_Dossier]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Dreamcast&diff=11741Sega Dreamcast2010-11-13T23:31:20Z<p>Jah450: </p>
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[[Category:Proposed Dossiers]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Dreamcast&diff=11740Sega Dreamcast2010-11-13T23:30:36Z<p>Jah450: Created page with 'Sorry, there is currently no dossier for the Sega Dreamcast.'</p>
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<div>Sorry, there is currently no dossier for the Sega Dreamcast.</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Home_Video_Game_Consoles&diff=11739Sega Home Video Game Consoles2010-11-13T23:27:36Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Rez_ingame.jpg|right|thumb|300pix|Screenshot from "REZ", Sonic Team/Sega 2001.]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Sega Enterprises, LTD released five standalone home video game systems between 1983 and 1999, all of which are currently discontinued. The aim of this dossier is not provide an exhaustive analysis of all Sega's dead media platforms, but rather to provide an overview of the company's home console division which serves as a portal for further investigation of its specific products. This dossier is concerned in particular with tracing the causes of Sega home systems' death and its relation to the ongoing negotiation between video games' military and arcade oriented genealogy as they adapt to domestic settings. <br />
<br />
In addition, this survey of Sega's large and obsolete body of products is an attempt to promote the archival and investigation of various obsolete video game technologies' historical importance to developing standards in the production, distribution, and experience of media technologies.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Origins ==<br />
<br />
=== Service Games: a Military-Industrial Entertainment Business ===<br />
<br />
The origins of Sega home video game consoles can be traced to David Rosen, a U.S. Air Force veteran who had been stationed in Japan. He began “a company in Japan named Rosen Enterprises that imported pinball machines as entertainment from the US” (De Peuter 91) after World War II. Rosen Enterprises merged with another American/Japanese amusement company in 1965 called Service Games.<br />
<br />
After merging, Service Games's name was shortened to Sega. In 1967, the company began producing its own mechanical arcade games for placement in Sega brand arcade locations around Japan.<br />
<br />
=== Arcade Gaming ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Altbeastplay.png|right|400pix|thumb|"Altered Beast" arcade screenshot. Sega, 1988.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:SpaceHarrier_arcadeflyer.png|right|400pix|thumb|Promotional flier for "Space Harrier". Sega AM2, 1985.]]<br />
<br />
Sega progenitor David Rosen recalls of early Sega arcade games: “The first game we built was Rifleman. Our first big hit was Periscope … From 1967 through 1979 we manufactured 140 different games” (DeMaria 233). Sega's earliest original productions played upon a number of militant and masculine tropes, including what media theorist Friedrich Kittler calls “structural correspondence between perspective and ballistics” (186).<br />
<br />
Cinematized representations of gunplay and marksmanship, popularized and formalized in wartime film, create “intertextual representative experiences”-- in this case “predicated on the player having existing knowledge … of how this specific type of action/spy hero masculinity is 'supposed' to operate” (Burrill 1), which includes aiming and firing weapons, identifying enemies, and basic visual familiarity with military machinery.<br />
<br />
Tapping into the culture of competition and masculinity inherited from the armed forces, Sega rooted its business model in facilitating “feats of strength and skill based on pain and violence” which produced and reproduced “male codes of power” (Burrill 6) in arcades. This militant approach to gaming was maintained throughout Sega's arcade and home offerings through the end of the 20th century.<br />
<br />
Doug Glen, Sega's VP of Business Development and Strategic Planning in the 1990's, described their business model in the following terms: <br />
<br />
“We look at it as a continuum of experience. You can leverage the asset from the highest end down to the mass market-- the home. We get into the leading edge and nurture the experience throughout the various manifestations” (De Peuter 137)<br />
<br />
For Sega, arcades constituted the 'leading edge' or 'highest end', while home systems provided an extension of the arcade experience for home markets. This emphasis on arcades and the audiences of “semidelinquent technophile” (Burrill 7) they catered to prevented Sega from developing home consoles and software that could gain popularity with domestic audiences of varied gender and taste. <br />
<br />
=== Sega SG-1000 & Sega Master System ===<br />
<br />
Sega released its first home video game console, the [[SG-1000]] in Japan on the same day in 1983 that Nintendo launched its FamiCom (short for “Family Computer”, marketed in the US as [[Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)]]. The SG-1000 was never released outside of Asia, where numerous third-party add-ons of dubious legality enabled it to play games for competing Colecovision and Atari 2600 systems (Kohler np).<br />
<br />
The system architecture was cloned and re-released by multiple companies beside Sega. The SG-1000's software and marketing were primarily concerned with re-mediating prior games and consoles, and the revenue from hardware sales was split between Sega and multiple other manufacturers. This lack of quality control was not unique to Sega and is widely credited with causing a video game industry crash in 1984.<br />
<br />
In 1985, Sega released the [[Sega Master System]], an 8-bit system designed to compete more effectively with Nintendo's NES. David Rosen recalls: <br />
<br />
*“after the game market collapse [in 1984]… the industry was fairly well written off. We had a product in the pipeline, but we had put it on the shelf. We took it off the shelf when we saw what was happening with Nintendo. But we were a year behind Nintendo and that was a very difficult hurdle to overcome” (DeMaria 234).<br />
<br />
The Sega Master System did not achieve notable success in Sega's primary markets (Japan and North America). It did, however, become popular in secondary markets, most notably Brazil and Europe, where consumers were less exposed to competing products. The possibility of marketing to underserved populations was thus revealed, and Sega repeated this approach, in certain ways, with its next console.<br />
<br />
== The 1990's ==<br />
<br />
===Genesis/Megadrive===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segacd32x.jpg|thumb|200pix|right|Fig. 2. A 2nd generation Sega Mega Drive with Mega CD and 32x attachments.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:Sonic1_box_usa.jpg|thumb|100pix|right|US packaging art for "Sonic the Hedgehog"]]<br />
<br />
<br />
“...initial NES players had gotten older and entered their teens. Their systems ended up in closets. They discovered girls. So we positioned Genesis as the product you graduated to. Once you put away your toys, you got Sega. And we gave them arcade games and sports” – Al Nilson, Sega of America Director of Marketing on launching the Genesis/Megadrive. (DeMaria 244)<br />
<br />
Between 1988 and 1989 Sega rolled out a 16-bit system in North America, Japan, and Europe. It was marketed as [[Sega Genesis]] in North America and Sega Mega Drive elsewhere. The system launched with ports of popular Sega arcade games like Golden Axe and Altered Beast, despite the fact that it “Looked like devil worship in the midwest” (DeMaria 247), according to Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske.<br />
<br />
The competitive games ported from Sega's arcade machines effectively provided “a sphere for bodily action as well as one in which the subject [could] fight off the looming threat of absent technologies” (Burrill 6), including home video games and computers, which recontextualized video gaming's arcade and military origins through “concealment, intimacy, [and] internalization” (Burril 3) in a mass-market domestic product. The Genesis is an example of domesticated technology providing a way for users to perform feats of power with military origins in the home, enabled by mass-market home television sets.<br />
<br />
With the Genesis, Sega helped usher in an era of 'console wars' against Nintendo. In order to compete with Nintendo's entrenched dominance in the home market, Sega produced home software that would expand upon the “Platform” genre of games defined by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers. These “cutesy jump 'n run games”, contain “a wide mix of gameplay elements” and include “identifiable characters and heroes”, thus deflecting some of the “controversy associated with more violent and disturbing game genres” (De Peuter 117) popular in arcades.<br />
<br />
Sega's character-driven platform game Sonic the Hedgehog, launched with the Genesis, featured a cartoon protagonist reminiscent of Bart Simpson and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, already popular with children and families on television. Simultaneously, Sonic the Hedgehog enabled players to navigate levels at a much higher speed than prior platform games, expanding the possibility for arcade-style displays of reflexes and prowess in home software.<br />
<br />
This two-tiered approach to software combined appeals to both military-industrial and domesticated video game tastes, though it leaned heavily on Sega's past in the military entertainment business. The Genesis hardware and marketing thereof was also thoroughly steeped in the culture of aggression that characterized Sega's entrepreneurial, arcade, and military origins. <br />
<br />
Because of the Nintendo NES's position of dominance in the home console marketplace of 1988, the company was “reluctant to innovate and vulnerable to being technologically leapfrogged” (De Peuter 129). Sega “followed the logic of the perpetual innovation economy” (ibid), engineering a console which could more faithfully reproduce the graphics of both arcade games and cartoon heroes than its competitors. <br />
<br />
Reliance on this type of blitzkrieg development toward new technological standards, a holdover from Sega's origins within the military-industrial economy, was a significant and recurring theme throughout the life cycle of their home hardware endeavors, contributing to their difficulty adapting to a rapidly domesticating home game market. <br />
<br />
==== Sega CD and 32x ====<br />
<br />
[[File:Night_Trap_Cover.jpg|right|thumb|US Box art for Night Trap. Digital Pictures/Sega 1992.]]<br />
<br />
The first suggestions that Sega was too aggressively masculine to continue its success in the home market arrived in the form of add-on hardware for the Genesis. The [[Sega CD]] (Mega CD in Europe and Japan), released in different markets between 1991 and 1993, was the second compact disc based home system commercially available. Most of its software relied heavily on digitized video of live actors, enabled by the CD's superior storage capabilities in comparison to the dominant medium of cartridges.<br />
<br />
“Standards determine how media reach our senses” (Kittler 36).<br />
<br />
CD-enabled full motion video game software on the Sega CD presented a shift from Sega's arcade roots, requiring that players spent much of their game-time watching video clips and not directly influencing on-screen actions. The Sega CD complicated Sega's already precarious balance between home and arcade game standards by adding an additional conflict between the emerging standards of computer cd-rom gaming and home theatre applications of CD storage technology. <br />
<br />
Without strong standards in place, the new format of CD FMV (full-motion video) games brought grainy video onto the television, heavily letterboxed and thus drawing attention to the “peep show character” (Kittler 223) of its small field of vision.<br />
<br />
The next add-on to hit markets dead-on-arrival was the [[32x]], a cartridge-based peripheral which piggybacked extra processors with the Genesis' original hardware. Released just months before its well-publicized standalone 32-bit CD-based system, the Saturn, however, little attention was paid to 32x by gamers or software developers. Again, lack of adherence to emerging standards concerning the lifecycle of home game consoles produced hardware that did not fit onto the “continuum of experiences” so crucial to Sega's earlier success.<br />
<br />
===Saturn===<br />
<br />
[[File:Egmsept97backcover.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Advertisement for World Series Baseball '98.]]<br />
<br />
Over 1994 and 1995, Sega released its standalone 32-bit system, the [[Sega Saturn]]. Launched with numerous arcade ports and rushed to market in attempt to repeat the Genesis' success at pre-empting competitors, Sega “miscalculated how quickly it [Saturn] would erode demand” for the Genesis. Within a year of Saturn's launch, “Sega of America took huge losses worldwide on warehouses full of unsold 16-bit games” (De Peuter 141).<br />
<br />
Saturn, though more popular than 32x or Sega CD, was still commercially unsuccessful. The system did not launch with a family-friendly franchise title like Sonic the Hedgehog, effectively ignoring gender and age diversity of home console consumers.<br />
<br />
However, much as certain filmmakers, reacting against “primacy of women cinemagoers” (Kittler 178) in determining a film's commercial success, originated the “masculine auteur film” (ibid), Sega's in-house software developers produced critically successful games such as NiGHTs into Dreams, a re-imagination of the two-dimensional platform genre in what came to be known as “2.5D” style. Gameplay takes place two axes much like a two-dimensional game, but is presented with from a viewpoint that moves through environments on all three axes. <br />
<br />
By 1998, however, Sega's market share against competitors Nintendo and Sony had dwindled to nine percent (De Peuter 141), as its aggressively masculine products failed to integrate with the changing home console market. Sega ignored the “very empirical” (Kittler 176) evidence of an age- and gender- diverse audience developing around the intersection of television and computer gaming, thus neglecting the era's emergent hybridity with cinematic content and audiences in increasingly general-purpose home theaters.<br />
<br />
=== The Dreamcast ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Dcmnov99p46sonic.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for Sonic Adventure. Sega, Sonic Team, 1999. Note the accusation that readers possess 'lame-ass reflexes'.]]<br />
<br />
In 1999, Sega launched its final home console, the [[Sega Dreamcast]]. Sega's first console to be designed in white rather than black plastic, it appeared initially as though the system could feminize Sega's product line, thus expanding its marketability to family audiences.<br />
<br />
Supporting this first impression, the Dreamcat launched with a family-friendly Sonic franchise game called Sonic Adventure. Sonic Adventure also used the Dreamcast's removable storage/display unit, the “VMU” to distribute a virtual pet minigame, playable on-the-go and similar to a [[Tamagotchi]].<br />
<br />
These apparent concessions to a television-watching living-room market did not carry across most of Dreamcast's other software or promotional materials, however. The system was promoted primarily to “14- to 24-year old dudes” (EGM Sept99 p174) at rock concerts and in inner cities, ostensibly targeting the demographic of “semidelinquent technophile” originally present both in arcades and “at the very origin of gaming's Pentagon-sponsored inception” (De Peuter 91).<br />
<br />
Just before the Dreamcast launched in 1999, Sega of America President Bernie Stolar described his business plan in the following terms:<br />
<br />
“...the next two Christmases for us are to show everyone that Sega is a leading company, and that Sega has the best software in the marketplace” (EGM 174)<br />
<br />
What did not factor into that plan was synergy with home theater hardware-- Sony's PlayStation2, launched in 2000, doubled as a DVD movie player, thus moving closer to what Friedrich Kittler might call a “general medium” (224), and certainly closer to a standard living-room appliance.<br />
<br />
Sega continued to offer primarily arcade ports and auteur games until the Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001.<br />
<br />
== Postmortem ==<br />
<br />
=== Competition, Arcades, and the Internet ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segachannel.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for the Sega Channel, 1995]]<br />
<br />
Sega's home console division displayed considerable reliance reliance upon competitive arcade games and masculine auteur software with obvious military-industrial origins. These offerings came into marketplace conflict with various more effective “public dissimulations” in the business of “mystifying or denying” (De Peuter 181) such origins.<br />
<br />
Despite any qualitative 'gameplay value' present in Sega home products, their competitors' products possessed the symbolic value of rendering video gaming appropriate to a home theater environment. Achieved intertextually through synergy between hardware design, software curation, marketing, and various other actions of “cultural intermediaries” (De Peuter 82). Rather than replacing “the mass consumers in the cinema hall with a single, lonely cybernaut” (Kittler 227) as had been done in their successful arcade and auteur games, Sega's competitors cinematized gaming for a mass audience. Game systems like Microsoft's X-Box and Sony's PlayStation2 added a new dimension of value to their products by providing DVD movie functionality in their machines, further dissimulating their military origins.<br />
<br />
In contrast, Sega undertook a number of costly experiments with online gaming during the lifespan of their home hardware division, attempting to capitalize upon “digital connectivity between many players (usually in their homes) who remain physically separated and isolated” (Burrill 62), enabling a type of dehumanized competitive sociality in a “clear extension of the arcade” (ibid).<br />
<br />
The experiments included [[Sega Channel]], a cable-tv add-on subscription service which provided about 50 Genesis games a month on a premium-channel pay format, and SegaNet, a 56k multiplayer network created in conjunction with AT&T for the Dreamcast. Both were unsuccessful, possibly because they relied on non-standard uses of technology. Sega Channel required extra hardware and a re-purposing of cable TV infrastructure, while SegaNet, despite Sega of America marketing director Charles Bellfield's claims that “There will be no problems on latency issues” (EGM 193), relied upon a [[56k modem]] to connect players over phone lines despite the emerging standards of broadband internet among online gamers.<br />
<br />
The Dreamcast hardware, however, lives on in the form of Sega's NAOMI arcade architecture, one of the most long-living arcade systems in history. Sega continues to produce both arcade and home software despite the defunctness of its home hardware division.<br />
<br />
=== Emulation ===<br />
<br />
Because Sega's home hardware systems have all been discontinued, very little software remains in print to accompany them. This presents numerous difficulties to enthusiasts, researchers and historians hoping to play them. The majority of activity concerning discontinued software and hardware for Sega's home systems happens through unofficial homebrew releases and emulators.<br />
<br />
The semidelinquent “antiheros” of video game history, have also developed the skills and tools necessary to be “productive of [themselves]” (Burrill 124), becoming “the code, the coder and the decoder” (ibid). Communities of enthusiasts began producing Dreamcast programs capable of running other home console games and new unofficial software releases before it was even discontinued, and numerous emulation projects that run on home computers existed even earlier.<br />
<br />
In 2006, Sega began offering official emulations of certain 'classic' games through the online Wii Virtual Console (Parish np)-- completing a circuit between arcades, Sega home consoles, masculine enthusiast-tinkerers and the “General Medium” of a broadband-enabled home console.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Works Cited ==<br />
<br />
Burrill, Derek A. "Die Tryin': Video Games, Masculinity, Culture", 2008. Peter Lang, New York.<br />
<br />
DeMaria, Rusel and Johnny L. Wilson. "High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games", 2002. McGraw Hill/Osborne, Berkeley CA.<br />
<br />
De Peuter, Greig, Stephen Kline and Nick Dyer-Witheford. "Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing", 2003. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal QC.<br />
<br />
"It's Here, But Should You Buy One?" Electronic Gaming Monthly, September 1999. p168-175.<br />
<br />
Kittler, Friedrich. "Optical Media", 2010. Polity Press, Malden MA.<br />
<br />
Kohler, Chris. "Playing the SG-1000, Sega's First Game Machine". http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/10/sega-sg-1000/. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
Parish, Jeremy. "The Best Virtual Console Wii Games". http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3154803. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Fall 2010]] [[Category:Video Games]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Home_Video_Game_Consoles&diff=11738Sega Home Video Game Consoles2010-11-13T23:25:48Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Rez_ingame.jpg|right|thumb|300pix|Screenshot from "REZ", Sonic Team/Sega 2001.]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Sega Enterprises, LTD released five standalone home video game systems between 1983 and 1999, all of which are currently discontinued. The aim of this dossier is not provide an exhaustive analysis of all Sega's dead media platforms, but rather to provide an overview of the company's home console division which serves as a portal for further investigation of its specific products. This dossier is concerned in particular with tracing the causes of Sega home systems' death and its relation to the ongoing negotiation between video games' military and arcade oriented genealogy as they adapt to domestic settings. <br />
<br />
In addition, this survey of Sega's large and obsolete body of products is an attempt to promote the archival and investigation of various obsolete video game technologies' historical importance to developing standards in the production, distribution, and experience of media technologies.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Origins ==<br />
<br />
=== Service Games: a Military-Industrial Entertainment Business ===<br />
<br />
The origins of Sega home video game consoles can be traced to David Rosen, a U.S. Air Force veteran who had been stationed in Japan. He began “a company in Japan named Rosen Enterprises that imported pinball machines as entertainment from the US” (De Peuter 91) after World War II. Rosen Enterprises merged with another American/Japanese amusement company in 1965 called Service Games.<br />
<br />
After merging, Service Games's name was shortened to Sega. In 1967, the company began producing its own mechanical arcade games for placement in Sega brand arcade locations around Japan.<br />
<br />
=== Arcade Gaming ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Altbeastplay.png|right|400pix|thumb|"Altered Beast" arcade screenshot. Sega, 1988.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:SpaceHarrier_arcadeflyer.png|right|400pix|thumb|Promotional flier for "Space Harrier". Sega AM2, 1985.]]<br />
<br />
Sega progenitor David Rosen recalls of early Sega arcade games: “The first game we built was Rifleman. Our first big hit was Periscope … From 1967 through 1979 we manufactured 140 different games” (DeMaria 233). Sega's earliest original productions played upon a number of militant and masculine tropes, including what media theorist Friedrich Kittler calls “structural correspondence between perspective and ballistics” (186).<br />
<br />
Cinematized representations of gunplay and marksmanship, popularized and formalized in wartime film, create “intertextual representative experiences”-- in this case “predicated on the player having existing knowledge … of how this specific type of action/spy hero masculinity is 'supposed' to operate” (Burrill 1), which includes aiming and firing weapons, identifying enemies, and basic visual familiarity with military machinery.<br />
<br />
Tapping into the culture of competition and masculinity inherited from the armed forces, Sega rooted its business model in facilitating “feats of strength and skill based on pain and violence” which produced and reproduced “male codes of power” (Burrill 6) in arcades. This militant approach to gaming was maintained throughout Sega's arcade and home offerings through the end of the 20th century.<br />
<br />
Doug Glen, Sega's VP of Business Development and Strategic Planning in the 1990's, described their business model in the following terms: <br />
<br />
“We look at it as a continuum of experience. You can leverage the asset from the highest end down to the mass market-- the home. We get into the leading edge and nurture the experience throughout the various manifestations” (De Peuter 137)<br />
<br />
For Sega, arcades constituted the 'leading edge' or 'highest end', while home systems provided an extension of the arcade experience for home markets. This emphasis on arcades and the audiences of “semidelinquent technophile” (Burrill 7) they catered to prevented Sega from developing home consoles and software that could gain popularity with domestic audiences of varied gender and taste. <br />
<br />
=== Sega SG-1000 & Sega Master System ===<br />
<br />
Sega released its first home video game console, the [[SG-1000]] in Japan on the same day in 1983 that Nintendo launched its FamiCom (short for “Family Computer”, marketed in the US as [[Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)]]. The SG-1000 was never released outside of Asia, where numerous third-party add-ons of dubious legality enabled it to play games for competing Colecovision and Atari 2600 systems (Kohler np).<br />
<br />
The system architecture was cloned and re-released by multiple companies beside Sega. The SG-1000's software and marketing were primarily concerned with re-mediating prior games and consoles, and the revenue from hardware sales was split between Sega and multiple other manufacturers. This lack of quality control was not unique to Sega and is widely credited with causing a video game industry crash in 1984.<br />
<br />
In 1985, Sega released the [[Sega Master System]], an 8-bit system designed to compete more effectively with Nintendo's NES. David Rosen recalls: <br />
<br />
*“after the game market collapse [in 1984]… the industry was fairly well written off. We had a product in the pipeline, but we had put it on the shelf. We took it off the shelf when we saw what was happening with Nintendo. But we were a year behind Nintendo and that was a very difficult hurdle to overcome” (DeMaria 234).<br />
<br />
The Sega Master System did not achieve notable success in Sega's primary markets (Japan and North America). It did, however, become popular in secondary markets, most notably Brazil and Europe, where consumers were less exposed to competing products. The possibility of marketing to underserved populations was thus revealed, and Sega repeated this approach, in certain ways, with its next console.<br />
<br />
== The 1990's ==<br />
<br />
===Genesis/Megadrive===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segacd32x.jpg|thumb|200pix|right|Fig. 2. A 2nd generation Sega Mega Drive with Mega CD and 32x attachments.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:Sonic1_box_usa.jpg|thumb|100pix|right|US packaging art for "Sonic the Hedgehog"]]<br />
<br />
<br />
“...initial NES players had gotten older and entered their teens. Their systems ended up in closets. They discovered girls. So we positioned Genesis as the product you graduated to. Once you put away your toys, you got Sega. And we gave them arcade games and sports” – Al Nilson, Sega of America Director of Marketing on launching the Genesis/Megadrive. (DeMaria 244)<br />
<br />
Between 1988 and 1989 Sega rolled out a 16-bit system in North America, Japan, and Europe. It was marketed as [[Sega Genesis]] in North America and Sega Mega Drive elsewhere. The system launched with ports of popular Sega arcade games like Golden Axe and Altered Beast, despite the fact that it “Looked like devil worship in the midwest” (DeMaria 247), according to Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske.<br />
<br />
The competitive games ported from Sega's arcade machines effectively provided “a sphere for bodily action as well as one in which the subject [could] fight off the looming threat of absent technologies” (Burrill 6), including home video games and computers, which recontextualized video gaming's arcade and military origins through “concealment, intimacy, [and] internalization” (Burril 3) in a mass-market domestic product. The Genesis is an example of domesticated technology providing a way for users to perform feats of power with military origins in the home, enabled by mass-market home television sets.<br />
<br />
With the Genesis, Sega helped usher in an era of 'console wars' against Nintendo. In order to compete with Nintendo's entrenched dominance in the home market, Sega produced home software that would expand upon the “Platform” genre of games defined by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers. These “cutesy jump 'n run games”, contain “a wide mix of gameplay elements” and include “identifiable characters and heroes”, thus deflecting some of the “controversy associated with more violent and disturbing game genres” (De Peuter 117) popular in arcades.<br />
<br />
Sega's character-driven platform game Sonic the Hedgehog, launched with the Genesis, featured a cartoon protagonist reminiscent of Bart Simpson and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, already popular with children and families on television. Simultaneously, Sonic the Hedgehog enabled players to navigate levels at a much higher speed than prior platform games, expanding the possibility for arcade-style displays of reflexes and prowess in home software.<br />
<br />
This two-tiered approach to software combined appeals to both military-industrial and domesticated video game tastes, though it leaned heavily on Sega's past in the military entertainment business. The Genesis hardware and marketing thereof was also thoroughly steeped in the culture of aggression that characterized Sega's entrepreneurial, arcade, and military origins. <br />
<br />
Because of the Nintendo NES's position of dominance in the home console marketplace of 1988, the company was “reluctant to innovate and vulnerable to being technologically leapfrogged” (De Peuter 129). Sega “followed the logic of the perpetual innovation economy” (ibid), engineering a console which could more faithfully reproduce the graphics of both arcade games and cartoon heroes than its competitors. <br />
<br />
Reliance on this type of blitzkrieg development toward new technological standards, a holdover from Sega's origins within the military-industrial economy, was a significant and recurring theme throughout the life cycle of their home hardware endeavors, contributing to their difficulty adapting to a rapidly domesticating home game market. <br />
<br />
==== Sega CD and 32x ====<br />
<br />
[[File:Night_Trap_Cover.jpg|right|thumb|US Box art for Night Trap. Digital Pictures/Sega 1992.]]<br />
<br />
The first suggestions that Sega was too aggressively masculine to continue its success in the home market arrived in the form of add-on hardware for the Genesis. The [[Sega CD]] (Mega CD in Europe and Japan), released in different markets between 1991 and 1993, was the second compact disc based home system commercially available. Most of its software relied heavily on digitized video of live actors, enabled by the CD's superior storage capabilities in comparison to the dominant medium of cartridges.<br />
<br />
“Standards determine how media reach our senses” (Kittler 36).<br />
<br />
CD-enabled full motion video game software on the Sega CD presented a shift from Sega's arcade roots, requiring that players spent much of their game-time watching video clips and not directly influencing on-screen actions. The Sega CD complicated Sega's already precarious balance between home and arcade game standards by adding an additional conflict between the emerging standards of computer cd-rom gaming and home theatre applications of CD storage technology. <br />
<br />
Without strong standards in place, the new format of CD FMV (full-motion video) games brought grainy video onto the television, heavily letterboxed and thus drawing attention to the “peep show character” (Kittler 223) of its small field of vision.<br />
<br />
The next add-on to hit markets dead-on-arrival was the [[32x]], a cartridge-based peripheral which piggybacked extra processors with the Genesis' original hardware. Released just months before its well-publicized standalone 32-bit CD-based system, the Saturn, however, little attention was paid to 32x by gamers or software developers. Again, lack of adherence to emerging standards concerning the lifecycle of home game consoles produced hardware that did not fit onto the “continuum of experiences” so crucial to Sega's earlier success.<br />
<br />
===Saturn===<br />
<br />
[[File:Egmsept97backcover.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Advertisement for World Series Baseball '98.]]<br />
<br />
Over 1994 and 1995, Sega released its standalone 32-bit system, the [[Sega Saturn]]. Launched with numerous arcade ports and rushed to market in attempt to repeat the Genesis' success at beating competitors to market, Sega “miscalculated how quickly it [Saturn] would erode demand” for the Genesis. Within a year of Saturn's launch, “Sega of America took huge losses worldwide on warehouses full of unsold 16-bit games” (De Peuter 141).<br />
<br />
Saturn, though more popular than 32x or Sega CD, was still commercially unsuccessful. The system did not launch with a family-friendly franchise title like Sonic the Hedgehog, effectively ignoring gender and age diversity of home console consumers.<br />
<br />
However, much as certain filmmakers, reacting against “primacy of women cinemagoers” (Kittler 178) in determining a film's commercial success, originated the “masculine auteur film” (ibid), Sega's in-house software developers produced critically successful games such as NiGHTs into Dreams, a re-imagination of the two-dimensional platform genre in what came to be known as “2.5D” style. Gameplay takes place two axes much like a two-dimensional game, but is presented with from a viewpoint that moves through environments on all three axes. <br />
<br />
By 1998, however, Sega's market share against competitors Nintendo and Sony had dwindled to nine percent (De Peuter 141), as its aggressively masculine products failed to integrate with the changing home console market. Sega ignored the “very empirical” (Kittler 176) evidence of an age- and gender- diverse audience developing around the intersection of television and computer gaming, thus neglecting the era's emergent hybridity with cinematic content and audiences in increasingly general-purpose home theaters.<br />
<br />
=== The Dreamcast ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Dcmnov99p46sonic.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for Sonic Adventure. Sega, Sonic Team, 1999. Note the accusation that readers possess 'lame-ass reflexes'.]]<br />
<br />
In 1999, Sega launched its final home console, the [[Sega Dreamcast]]. Sega's first console to be designed in white rather than black plastic, it appeared initially as though the system could feminize Sega's product line, thus expanding its marketability to family audiences.<br />
<br />
Supporting this first impression, the Dreamcat launched with a family-friendly Sonic franchise game called Sonic Adventure. Sonic Adventure also used the Dreamcast's removable storage/display unit, the “VMU” to distribute a virtual pet minigame, playable on-the-go and similar to a [[Tamagotchi]].<br />
<br />
These apparent concessions to a television-watching living-room market did not carry across most of Dreamcast's other software or promotional materials, however. The system was promoted primarily to “14- to 24-year old dudes” (EGM Sept99 p174) at rock concerts and in inner cities, ostensibly targeting the demographic of “semidelinquent technophile” originally present both in arcades and “at the very origin of gaming's Pentagon-sponsored inception” (De Peuter 91).<br />
<br />
Just before the Dreamcast launched in 1999, Sega of America President Bernie Stolar described his business plan in the following terms:<br />
<br />
“...the next two Christmases for us are to show everyone that Sega is a leading company, and that Sega has the best software in the marketplace” (EGM 174)<br />
<br />
What did not factor into that plan was synergy with home theater hardware-- Sony's PlayStation2, launched in 2000, doubled as a DVD movie player, thus moving closer to what Friedrich Kittler might call a “general medium” (224), and certainly closer to a standard living-room appliance.<br />
<br />
Sega continued to offer primarily arcade ports and auteur games until the Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001.<br />
<br />
== Postmortem ==<br />
<br />
=== Competition, Arcades, and the Internet ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segachannel.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for the Sega Channel, 1995]]<br />
<br />
Sega's home console division displayed considerable reliance reliance upon competitive arcade games and masculine auteur software with obvious military-industrial origins. These offerings came into marketplace conflict with various more effective “public dissimulations” in the business of “mystifying or denying” (De Peuter 181) such origins.<br />
<br />
Despite any qualitative 'gameplay value' present in Sega home products, their competitors' products possessed the symbolic value of rendering video gaming appropriate to a home theater environment. Achieved intertextually through synergy between hardware design, software curation, marketing, and various other actions of “cultural intermediaries” (De Peuter 82). Rather than replacing “the mass consumers in the cinema hall with a single, lonely cybernaut” (Kittler 227) as had been done in their successful arcade and auteur games, Sega's competitors cinematized gaming for a mass audience. Game systems like Microsoft's X-Box and Sony's PlayStation2 added a new dimension of value to their products by providing DVD movie functionality in their machines, further dissimulating their military origins.<br />
<br />
In contrast, Sega undertook a number of costly experiments with online gaming during the lifespan of their home hardware division, attempting to capitalize upon “digital connectivity between many players (usually in their homes) who remain physically separated and isolated” (Burrill 62), enabling a type of dehumanized competitive sociality in a “clear extension of the arcade” (ibid).<br />
<br />
The experiments included [[Sega Channel]], a cable-tv add-on subscription service which provided about 50 Genesis games a month on a premium-channel pay format, and SegaNet, a 56k multiplayer network created in conjunction with AT&T for the Dreamcast. Both were unsuccessful, possibly because they relied on non-standard uses of technology. Sega Channel required extra hardware and a re-purposing of cable TV infrastructure, while SegaNet, despite Sega of America marketing director Charles Bellfield's claims that “There will be no problems on latency issues” (EGM 193), relied upon a [[56k modem]] to connect players over phone lines despite the emerging standards of broadband internet among online gamers.<br />
<br />
The Dreamcast hardware, however, lives on in the form of Sega's NAOMI arcade architecture, one of the most long-living arcade systems in history. Sega continues to produce both arcade and home software despite the defunctness of its home hardware division.<br />
<br />
=== Emulation ===<br />
<br />
Because Sega's home hardware systems have all been discontinued, very little software remains in print to accompany them. This presents numerous difficulties to enthusiasts, researchers and historians hoping to play them. The majority of activity concerning discontinued software and hardware for Sega's home systems happens through unofficial homebrew releases and emulators.<br />
<br />
The semidelinquent “antiheros” of video game history, have also developed the skills and tools necessary to be “productive of [themselves]” (Burrill 124), becoming “the code, the coder and the decoder” (ibid). Communities of enthusiasts began producing Dreamcast programs capable of running other home console games and new unofficial software releases before it was even discontinued, and numerous emulation projects that run on home computers existed even earlier.<br />
<br />
In 2006, Sega began offering official emulations of certain 'classic' games through the online Wii Virtual Console (Parish np)-- completing a circuit between arcades, Sega home consoles, masculine enthusiast-tinkerers and the “General Medium” of a broadband-enabled home console.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Works Cited ==<br />
<br />
Burrill, Derek A. "Die Tryin': Video Games, Masculinity, Culture", 2008. Peter Lang, New York.<br />
<br />
DeMaria, Rusel and Johnny L. Wilson. "High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games", 2002. McGraw Hill/Osborne, Berkeley CA.<br />
<br />
De Peuter, Greig, Stephen Kline and Nick Dyer-Witheford. "Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing", 2003. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal QC.<br />
<br />
"It's Here, But Should You Buy One?" Electronic Gaming Monthly, September 1999. p168-175.<br />
<br />
Kittler, Friedrich. "Optical Media", 2010. Polity Press, Malden MA.<br />
<br />
Kohler, Chris. "Playing the SG-1000, Sega's First Game Machine". http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/10/sega-sg-1000/. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
Parish, Jeremy. "The Best Virtual Console Wii Games". http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3154803. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Fall 2010]] [[Category:Video Games]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Home_Video_Game_Consoles&diff=11737Sega Home Video Game Consoles2010-11-13T23:22:13Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Rez_ingame.jpg|right|thumb|300pix|Screenshot from "REZ", Sonic Team/Sega 2001.]]<br />
<br />
<br />
Sega Enterprises, LTD released five standalone home video game systems between 1983 and 1999, all of which are currently discontinued. The aim of this dossier is not provide an exhaustive analysis of all Sega's dead media platforms, but rather to provide an overview of the company's home console division which serves as a portal for further investigation of its specific products. This dossier is concerned in particular with tracing the causes of Sega home systems' death and its relation to the ongoing negotiation between video games' military and arcade oriented genealogy as they adapt to domestic settings. <br />
<br />
In addition, this survey of Sega's large and obsolete body of products is an attempt to promote the archival and investigation of various obsolete video game technologies' historical importance to developing standards in the production, distribution, and experience of media technologies.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Origins ==<br />
<br />
=== Service Games: a Military-Industrial Entertainment Business ===<br />
<br />
The origins of Sega home video game consoles can be traced to David Rosen, a U.S. Air Force veteran who had been stationed in Japan. He began “a company in Japan named Rosen Enterprises that imported pinball machines as entertainment from the US” (De Peuter 91) after World War II. Rosen Enterprises merged with another American/Japanese amusement company in 1965 called Service Games.<br />
<br />
After merging, Service Games's name was shortened to Sega. In 1967, the company began producing its own mechanical arcade games for placement in Sega brand arcade locations around Japan.<br />
<br />
=== Arcade Gaming ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Altbeastplay.png|right|400pix|thumb|"Altered Beast" arcade screenshot. Sega, 1988.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:SpaceHarrier_arcadeflyer.png|right|400pix|thumb|Promotional flier for "Space Harrier". Sega AM2, 1985.]]<br />
<br />
Sega progenitor David Rosen recalls of early Sega arcade games: “The first game we built was Rifleman. Our first big hit was Periscope … From 1967 through 1979 we manufactured 140 different games” (DeMaria 233). Sega's earliest original productions played upon a number of militant and masculine tropes, including what media theorist Friedrich Kittler calls “structural correspondence between perspective and ballistics” (186).<br />
<br />
Cinematized representations of gunplay and marksmanship, popularized and formalized in wartime film, create “intertextual representative experiences”-- in this case “predicated on the player having existing knowledge … of how this specific type of action/spy hero masculinity is 'supposed' to operate” (Burrill 1), which includes aiming and firing weapons, identifying enemies, and basic visual familiarity with military machinery.<br />
<br />
Tapping into the culture of competition and masculinity inherited from the armed forces, Sega rooted its business model in facilitating “feats of strength and skill based on pain and violence” which produced and reproduced “male codes of power” (Burrill 6) in arcades. This militant approach to gaming was maintained throughout Sega's arcade and home offerings through the end of the 20th century.<br />
<br />
Doug Glen, Sega's VP of Business Development and Strategic Planning in the 1990's, described their business model in the following terms: <br />
<br />
“We look at it as a continuum of experience. You can leverage the asset from the highest end down to the mass market-- the home. We get into the leading edge and nurture the experience throughout the various manifestations” (De Peuter 137)<br />
<br />
For Sega, arcades constituted the 'leading edge' or 'highest end', while home systems provided an extension of the arcade experience for home markets. This emphasis on arcades and the audiences of “semidelinquent technophile” (Burrill 7) they catered to prevented Sega from developing home consoles and software that could gain popularity with domestic audiences of varied gender and taste. <br />
<br />
=== Sega SG-1000 & Sega Master System ===<br />
<br />
Sega released its first home video game console, the [[SG-1000]] in Japan on the same day in 1983 that Nintendo launched its FamiCom (short for “Family Computer”, marketed in the US as [[Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)]]. The SG-1000 was never released outside of Asia, where numerous third-party add-ons of dubious legality enabled it to play games for competing Colecovision and Atari 2600 systems (Kohler np).<br />
<br />
The system architecture was cloned and re-released by multiple companies beside Sega. The SG-1000's software and marketing were primarily concerned with re-mediating prior games and consoles, and the revenue from hardware sales was split between Sega and multiple other manufacturers. This lack of quality control was not unique to Sega and is widely credited with causing a video game industry crash in 1984.<br />
<br />
In 1985, Sega released the [[Sega Master System]], an 8-bit system designed to compete more effectively with Nintendo's NES. David Rosen recalls: <br />
<br />
“after the game market collapse [in 1984]… the industry was fairly well written off. We had a product in the pipeline, but we had put it on the shelf. We took it off the shelf when we saw what was happening with Nintendo. But we were a year behind Nintendo and that was a very difficult hurdle to overcome” (DeMaria 234).<br />
<br />
The Sega Master System did not achieve notable success in Sega's primary markets (Japan and North America). It did, however, become popular in secondary markets, most notably Brazil and Europe, where consumers were less exposed to competing products. The possibility of marketing to underserved populations was thus revealed, and Sega repeated this approach, in certain ways, with its next console.<br />
<br />
== The 1990's ==<br />
<br />
===Genesis/Megadrive===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segacd32x.jpg|thumb|200pix|right|Fig. 2. A 2nd generation Sega Mega Drive with Mega CD and 32x attachments.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:Sonic1_box_usa.jpg|thumb|100pix|right|US packaging art for "Sonic the Hedgehog"]]<br />
<br />
<br />
“...initial NES players had gotten older and entered their teens. Their systems ended up in closets. They discovered girls. So we positioned Genesis as the product you graduated to. Once you put away your toys, you got Sega. And we gave them arcade games and sports” – Al Nilson, Sega of America Director of Marketing on launching the Genesis/Megadrive. (DeMaria 244)<br />
<br />
Between 1988 and 1989 Sega rolled out a 16-bit system in North America, Japan, and Europe. It was marketed as [[Sega Genesis]] in North America and Sega Mega Drive elsewhere. The system launched with ports of popular Sega arcade games like Golden Axe and Altered Beast, despite the fact that it “Looked like devil worship in the midwest” (DeMaria 247), according to Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske.<br />
<br />
The competitive games ported from Sega's arcade machines effectively provided “a sphere for bodily action as well as one in which the subject [could] fight off the looming threat of absent technologies” (Burrill 6), including home video games and computers, which recontextualized video gaming's arcade and military origins through “concealment, intimacy, [and] internalization” (Burril 3) in a mass-market domestic product. The Genesis is an example of domesticated technology providing a way for users to perform feats of power with military origins in the home, enabled by mass-market home television sets.<br />
With the Genesis, Sega helped usher in an era of 'console wars' against Nintendo. In order to compete with Nintendo's entrenched dominance in the home market, Sega produced home software that would expand upon the “Platform” genre of games defined by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers. These “cutesy jump 'n run games”, contain “a wide mix of gameplay elements” and include “identifiable characters and heroes”, thus deflecting some of the “controversy associated with more violent and disturbing game genres” (De Peuter 117) popular in arcades.<br />
<br />
Sega's character-driven platform game Sonic the Hedgehog, launched with the Genesis, featured a cartoon protagonist reminiscent of Bart Simpson and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, already popular with children and families on television. Simultaneously, Sonic the Hedgehog enabled players to navigate levels at a much higher speed than prior platform games, expanding the possibility for arcade-style displays of reflexes and prowess in home software.<br />
<br />
This two-tiered approach to software combined appeals to both military-industrial and domesticated video game tastes, though it leaned heavily on Sega's past in the military entertainment business. The Genesis hardware and marketing thereof was also thoroughly steeped in the culture of aggression that characterized Sega's entrepreneurial, arcade, and military origins. <br />
<br />
Because of the Nintendo NES's position of dominance in the home console marketplace of 1988, the company was “reluctant to innovate and vulnerable to being technologically leapfrogged” (De Peuter 129). Sega “followed the logic of the perpetual innovation economy” (ibid), engineering a console which could more faithfully reproduce the graphics of both arcade games and cartoon heroes than its competitors. <br />
<br />
Reliance on this type of blitzkrieg development toward new technological standards, a holdover from Sega's origins within the military-industrial economy, was a significant and recurring theme throughout the life cycle of their home hardware endeavors, contributing to their difficulty adapting to a rapidly domesticating home game market. <br />
<br />
==== Sega CD and 32x ====<br />
<br />
[[File:Night_Trap_Cover.jpg|right|thumb|US Box art for Night Trap. Digital Pictures/Sega 1992.]]<br />
<br />
The first suggestions that Sega was too aggressively masculine to continue its success in the home market arrived in the form of add-on hardware for the Genesis. The [[Sega CD]] (Mega CD in Europe and Japan), released in different markets between 1991 and 1993, was the second compact disc based home system commercially available. Most of its software relied heavily on digitized video of live actors, enabled by the CD's superior storage capabilities in comparison to the dominant medium of cartridges.<br />
<br />
“Standards determine how media reach our senses” (Kittler 36).<br />
<br />
CD-enabled full motion video game software on the Sega CD presented a shift from Sega's arcade roots, requiring that players spent much of their game-time watching video clips and not directly influencing on-screen actions. The Sega CD complicated Sega's already precarious balance between home and arcade game standards by adding an additional conflict between the emerging standards of computer cd-rom gaming and home theatre applications of CD storage technology. <br />
<br />
Without strong standards in place, the new format of CD FMV (full-motion video) games brought grainy video onto the television, heavily letterboxed and thus drawing attention to the “peep show character” (Kittler 223) of its small field of vision.<br />
<br />
The next add-on to hit markets dead-on-arrival was the [[32x]], a cartridge-based peripheral which piggybacked extra processors with the Genesis' original hardware. Released just months before its well-publicized standalone 32-bit CD-based system, the Saturn, however, little attention was paid to 32x by gamers or software developers. Again, lack of adherence to emerging standards concerning the lifecycle of home game consoles produced hardware that did not fit onto the “continuum of experiences” so crucial to Sega's earlier success.<br />
<br />
===Saturn===<br />
<br />
[[File:Egmsept97backcover.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Advertisement for World Series Baseball '98.]]<br />
<br />
Over 1994 and 1995, Sega released its standalone 32-bit system, the [[Sega Saturn]]. Launched with numerous arcade ports and rushed to market in attempt to repeat the Genesis' success at beating competitors to market, Sega “miscalculated how quickly it [Saturn] would erode demand” for the Genesis. Within a year of Saturn's launch, “Sega of America took huge losses worldwide on warehouses full of unsold 16-bit games” (De Peuter 141).<br />
<br />
Saturn, though more popular than 32x or Sega CD, was still commercially unsuccessful. The system did not launch with a family-friendly franchise title like Sonic the Hedgehog, effectively ignoring gender and age diversity of home console consumers.<br />
<br />
However, much as certain filmmakers, reacting against “primacy of women cinemagoers” (Kittler 178) in determining a film's commercial success, originated the “masculine auteur film” (ibid), Sega's in-house software developers produced critically successful games such as NiGHTs into Dreams, a re-imagination of the two-dimensional platform genre in what came to be known as “2.5D” style. Gameplay takes place two axes much like a two-dimensional game, but is presented with from a viewpoint that moves through environments on all three axes. <br />
<br />
By 1998, however, Sega's market share against competitors Nintendo and Sony had dwindled to nine percent (De Peuter 141), as its aggressively masculine products failed to integrate with the changing home console market. Sega ignored the “very empirical” (Kittler 176) evidence of an age- and gender- diverse audience developing around the intersection of television and computer gaming, thus neglecting the era's emergent hybridity with cinematic content and audiences in increasingly general-purpose home theaters.<br />
<br />
=== The Dreamcast ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Dcmnov99p46sonic.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for Sonic Adventure. Sega, Sonic Team, 1999. Note the accusation that readers possess 'lame-ass reflexes'.]]<br />
<br />
In 1999, Sega launched its final home console, the [[Sega Dreamcast]]. Sega's first console to be designed in white rather than black plastic, it appeared initially as though the system could feminize Sega's product line, thus expanding its marketability to family audiences.<br />
<br />
Supporting this first impression, the Dreamcat launched with a family-friendly Sonic franchise game called Sonic Adventure. Sonic Adventure also used the Dreamcast's removable storage/display unit, the “VMU” to distribute a virtual pet minigame, playable on-the-go and similar to a [[Tamagotchi]].<br />
<br />
These apparent concessions to a television-watching living-room market did not carry across most of Dreamcast's other software or promotional materials, however. The system was promoted primarily to “14- to 24-year old dudes” (EGM Sept99 p174) at rock concerts and in inner cities, ostensibly targeting the demographic of “semidelinquent technophile” originally present both in arcades and “at the very origin of gaming's Pentagon-sponsored inception” (De Peuter 91).<br />
<br />
Just before the Dreamcast launched in 1999, Sega of America President Bernie Stolar described his business plan in the following terms:<br />
<br />
“...the next two Christmases for us are to show everyone that Sega is a leading company, and that Sega has the best software in the marketplace” (EGM 174)<br />
<br />
What did not factor into that plan was synergy with home theater hardware-- Sony's PlayStation2, launched in 2000, doubled as a DVD movie player, thus moving closer to what Friedrich Kittler might call a “general medium” (224), and certainly closer to a standard living-room appliance.<br />
<br />
Sega continued to offer primarily arcade ports and auteur games until the Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001.<br />
<br />
== Postmortem ==<br />
<br />
=== Competition, Arcades, and the Internet ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segachannel.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for the Sega Channel, 1995]]<br />
<br />
Sega's home console division displayed considerable reliance reliance upon competitive arcade games and masculine auteur software with obvious military-industrial origins. These offerings came into marketplace conflict with various more effective “public dissimulations” in the business of “mystifying or denying” (De Peuter 181) such origins.<br />
<br />
Despite any qualitative 'gameplay value' present in Sega home products, their competitors' products possessed the symbolic value of rendering video gaming appropriate to a home theater environment. Achieved intertextually through synergy between hardware design, software curation, marketing, and various other actions of “cultural intermediaries” (De Peuter 82). Rather than replacing “the mass consumers in the cinema hall with a single, lonely cybernaut” (Kittler 227) as had been done in their successful arcade and auteur games, Sega's competitors cinematized gaming for a mass audience. Game systems like Microsoft's X-Box and Sony's PlayStation2 added a new dimension of value to their products by providing DVD movie functionality in their machines, further dissimulating their military origins.<br />
<br />
In contrast, Sega undertook a number of costly experiments with online gaming during the lifespan of their home hardware division, attempting to capitalize upon “digital connectivity between many players (usually in their homes) who remain physically separated and isolated” (Burrill 62), enabling a type of dehumanized competitive sociality in a “clear extension of the arcade” (ibid).<br />
<br />
The experiments included [[Sega Channel]], a cable-tv add-on subscription service which provided about 50 Genesis games a month on a premium-channel pay format, and SegaNet, a 56k multiplayer network created in conjunction with AT&T for the Dreamcast. Both were unsuccessful, possibly because they relied on non-standard uses of technology. Sega Channel required extra hardware and a re-purposing of cable TV infrastructure, while SegaNet, despite Sega of America marketing director Charles Bellfield's claims that “There will be no problems on latency issues” (EGM 193), relied upon a [[56k modem]] to connect players over phone lines despite the emerging standards of broadband internet among online gamers.<br />
<br />
The Dreamcast hardware, however, lives on in the form of Sega's NAOMI arcade architecture, one of the most long-living arcade systems in history. Sega continues to produce both arcade and home software despite the defunctness of its home hardware division.<br />
<br />
=== Emulation ===<br />
<br />
Because Sega's home hardware systems have all been discontinued, very little software remains in print to accompany them. This presents numerous difficulties to enthusiasts, researchers and historians hoping to play them. The majority of activity concerning discontinued software and hardware for Sega's home systems happens through unofficial homebrew releases and emulators.<br />
<br />
The semidelinquent “antiheros” of video game history, have also developed the skills and tools necessary to be “productive of [themselves]” (Burrill 124), becoming “the code, the coder and the decoder” (ibid). Communities of enthusiasts began producing Dreamcast programs capable of running other home console games and new unofficial software releases before it was even discontinued, and numerous emulation projects that run on home computers existed even earlier.<br />
<br />
In 2006, Sega began offering official emulations of certain 'classic' games through the online Wii Virtual Console (Parish np)-- completing a circuit between arcades, Sega home consoles, masculine enthusiast-tinkerers and the “General Medium” of a broadband-enabled home console.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Works Cited ==<br />
<br />
Burrill, Derek A. "Die Tryin': Video Games, Masculinity, Culture", 2008. Peter Lang, New York.<br />
<br />
DeMaria, Rusel and Johnny L. Wilson. "High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games", 2002. McGraw Hill/Osborne, Berkeley CA.<br />
<br />
De Peuter, Greig, Stephen Kline and Nick Dyer-Witheford. "Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing", 2003. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal QC.<br />
<br />
"It's Here, But Should You Buy One?" Electronic Gaming Monthly, September 1999. p168-175.<br />
<br />
Kittler, Friedrich. "Optical Media", 2010. Polity Press, Malden MA.<br />
<br />
Kohler, Chris. "Playing the SG-1000, Sega's First Game Machine". http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/10/sega-sg-1000/. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
Parish, Jeremy. "The Best Virtual Console Wii Games". http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3154803. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Fall 2010]] [[Category:Video Games]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Home_Video_Game_Consoles&diff=11736Sega Home Video Game Consoles2010-11-13T23:16:15Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Rez_ingame.jpg|right|thumb|300pix|Screenshot from "REZ", Sonic Team/Sega 2001.]]<br />
<br />
////This dossier is currently in pre-beta stage. Please return on SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2010 to view the completed text complete with pretty pictures and revised/edited text.<br />
<br />
Sega Enterprises, LTD released five standalone home video game systems between 1983 and 1999, all of which are currently discontinued. The aim of this dossier is not provide an exhaustive analysis of all Sega's dead media platforms, but rather to provide an overview of the company's home console division which serves as a portal for further investigation of its specific products. This dossier is concerned in particular with tracing the causes of Sega home systems' death and its relation to the ongoing negotiation between video games' military and arcade oriented genealogy as they adapt to domestic settings. <br />
<br />
In addition, this survey of Sega's large and obsolete body of products is an attempt to promote the archival and investigation of various obsolete video game technologies' historical importance to developing standards in the production, distribution, and experience of media technologies.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Origins ==<br />
<br />
=== Service Games: a Military-Industrial Entertainment Business ===<br />
<br />
The origins of Sega home video game consoles can be traced to David Rosen, a U.S. Air Force veteran who had been stationed in Japan. He began “a company in Japan named Rosen Enterprises that imported pinball machines as entertainment from the US” (De Peuter 91) after World War II. Rosen Enterprises merged with another American/Japanese amusement company in 1965 called Service Games.<br />
<br />
After merging, Service Games's name was shortened to Sega. In 1967, the company began producing its own mechanical arcade games for placement in Sega brand arcade locations around Japan.<br />
<br />
=== Arcade Gaming ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Altbeastplay.png|right|400pix|thumb|"Altered Beast" arcade screenshot. Sega, 1988.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:SpaceHarrier_arcadeflyer.png|right|400pix|thumb|Promotional flier for "Space Harrier". Sega AM2, 1985.]]<br />
<br />
Sega progenitor David Rosen recalls of early Sega arcade games: “The first game we built was Rifleman. Our first big hit was Periscope … From 1967 through 1979 we manufactured 140 different games” (DeMaria 233). Sega's earliest original productions played upon a number of militant and masculine tropes, including what media theorist Friedrich Kittler calls “structural correspondence between perspective and ballistics” (186).<br />
<br />
Cinematized representations of gunplay and marksmanship, popularized and formalized in wartime film, create “intertextual representative experiences”-- in this case “predicated on the player having existing knowledge … of how this specific type of action/spy hero masculinity is 'supposed' to operate” (Burrill 1), which includes aiming and firing weapons, identifying enemies, and basic visual familiarity with military machinery.<br />
<br />
Tapping into the culture of competition and masculinity inherited from the armed forces, Sega rooted its business model in facilitating “feats of strength and skill based on pain and violence” which produced and reproduced “male codes of power” (Burrill 6) in arcades. This militant approach to gaming was maintained throughout Sega's arcade and home offerings through the end of the 20th century.<br />
<br />
Doug Glen, Sega's VP of Business Development and Strategic Planning in the 1990's, described their business model in the following terms: <br />
<br />
“We look at it as a continuum of experience. You can leverage the asset from the highest end down to the mass market-- the home. We get into the leading edge and nurture the experience throughout the various manifestations” (De Peuter 137)<br />
<br />
For Sega, arcades constituted the 'leading edge' or 'highest end', while home systems provided an extension of the arcade experience for home markets. This emphasis on arcades and the audiences of “semidelinquent technophile” (Burrill 7) they catered to prevented Sega from developing home consoles and software that could gain popularity with domestic audiences of varied gender and taste. <br />
<br />
=== Sega SG-1000 & Sega Master System ===<br />
<br />
Sega released its first home video game console, the [[SG-1000]] in Japan on the same day in 1983 that Nintendo launched its FamiCom (short for “Family Computer”, marketed in the US as [[Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)]]. The SG-1000 was never released outside of Asia, where numerous third-party add-ons of dubious legality enabled it to play games for competing Colecovision and Atari 2600 systems (Kohler np).<br />
<br />
The system architecture was cloned and re-released by multiple companies beside Sega. The SG-1000's software and marketing were primarily concerned with re-mediating prior games and consoles, and the revenue from hardware sales was split between Sega and multiple other manufacturers. This lack of quality control was not unique to Sega and is widely credited with causing a video game industry crash in 1984.<br />
<br />
In 1985, Sega released the [[Sega Master System]], an 8-bit system designed to compete more effectively with Nintendo's NES. David Rosen recalls: <br />
<br />
“after the game market collapse [in 1984]… the industry was fairly well written off. We had a product in the pipeline, but we had put it on the shelf. We took it off the shelf when we saw what was happening with Nintendo. But we were a year behind Nintendo and that was a very difficult hurdle to overcome” (DeMaria 234).<br />
<br />
The Sega Master System did not achieve notable success in Sega's primary markets (Japan and North America). It did, however, become popular in secondary markets, most notably Brazil and Europe, where consumers were less exposed to competing products. The possibility of marketing to underserved populations was thus revealed, and Sega repeated this approach, in certain ways, with its next console.<br />
<br />
== The 1990's ==<br />
<br />
===Genesis/Megadrive===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segacd32x.jpg|thumb|200pix|right|Fig. 2. A 2nd generation Sega Mega Drive with Mega CD and 32x attachments.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:Sonic1_box_usa.jpg|thumb|100pix|right|US packaging art for "Sonic the Hedgehog"]]<br />
<br />
<br />
“...initial NES players had gotten older and entered their teens. Their systems ended up in closets. They discovered girls. So we positioned Genesis as the product you graduated to. Once you put away your toys, you got Sega. And we gave them arcade games and sports” – Al Nilson, Sega of America Director of Marketing on launching the Genesis/Megadrive. (DeMaria 244)<br />
<br />
Between 1988 and 1989 Sega rolled out a 16-bit system in North America, Japan, and Europe. It was marketed as [[Sega Genesis]] in North America and Sega Mega Drive elsewhere. The system launched with ports of popular Sega arcade games like Golden Axe and Altered Beast, despite the fact that it “Looked like devil worship in the midwest” (DeMaria 247), according to Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske.<br />
<br />
The competitive games ported from Sega's arcade machines effectively provided “a sphere for bodily action as well as one in which the subject [could] fight off the looming threat of absent technologies” (Burrill 6), including home video games and computers, which recontextualized video gaming's arcade and military origins through “concealment, intimacy, [and] internalization” (Burril 3) in a mass-market domestic product. The Genesis is an example of domesticated technology providing a way for users to perform feats of power with military origins in the home, enabled by mass-market home television sets.<br />
With the Genesis, Sega helped usher in an era of 'console wars' against Nintendo. In order to compete with Nintendo's entrenched dominance in the home market, Sega produced home software that would expand upon the “Platform” genre of games defined by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers. These “cutesy jump 'n run games”, contain “a wide mix of gameplay elements” and include “identifiable characters and heroes”, thus deflecting some of the “controversy associated with more violent and disturbing game genres” (De Peuter 117) popular in arcades.<br />
<br />
Sega's character-driven platform game Sonic the Hedgehog, launched with the Genesis, featured a cartoon protagonist reminiscent of Bart Simpson and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, already popular with children and families on television. Simultaneously, Sonic the Hedgehog enabled players to navigate levels at a much higher speed than prior platform games, expanding the possibility for arcade-style displays of reflexes and prowess in home software.<br />
<br />
This two-tiered approach to software combined appeals to both military-industrial and domesticated video game tastes, though it leaned heavily on Sega's past in the military entertainment business. The Genesis hardware and marketing thereof was also thoroughly steeped in the culture of aggression that characterized Sega's entrepreneurial, arcade, and military origins. <br />
<br />
Because of the Nintendo NES's position of dominance in the home console marketplace of 1988, the company was “reluctant to innovate and vulnerable to being technologically leapfrogged” (De Peuter 129). Sega “followed the logic of the perpetual innovation economy” (ibid), engineering a console which could more faithfully reproduce the graphics of both arcade games and cartoon heroes than its competitors. <br />
<br />
Reliance on this type of blitzkrieg development toward new technological standards, a holdover from Sega's origins within the military-industrial economy, was a significant and recurring theme throughout the life cycle of their home hardware endeavors, contributing to their difficulty adapting to a rapidly domesticating home game market. <br />
<br />
==== Sega CD and 32x ====<br />
<br />
[[File:Night_Trap_Cover.jpg|right|thumb|US Box art for Night Trap. Digital Pictures/Sega 1992.]]<br />
<br />
The first suggestions that Sega was too aggressively masculine to continue its success in the home market arrived in the form of add-on hardware for the Genesis. The [[Sega CD]] (Mega CD in Europe and Japan), released in different markets between 1991 and 1993, was the second compact disc based home system commercially available. Most of its software relied heavily on digitized video of live actors, enabled by the CD's superior storage capabilities in comparison to the dominant medium of cartridges.<br />
<br />
“Standards determine how media reach our senses” (Kittler 36).<br />
<br />
CD-enabled full motion video game software on the Sega CD presented a shift from Sega's arcade roots, requiring that players spent much of their game-time watching video clips and not directly influencing on-screen actions. The Sega CD complicated Sega's already precarious balance between home and arcade game standards by adding an additional conflict between the emerging standards of computer cd-rom gaming and home theatre applications of CD storage technology. <br />
<br />
Without strong standards in place, the new format of CD FMV (full-motion video) games brought grainy video onto the television, heavily letterboxed and thus drawing attention to the “peep show character” (Kittler 223) of its small field of vision.<br />
<br />
The next add-on to hit markets dead-on-arrival was the [[32x]], a cartridge-based peripheral which piggybacked extra processors with the Genesis' original hardware. Released just months before its well-publicized standalone 32-bit CD-based system, the Saturn, however, little attention was paid to 32x by gamers or software developers. Again, lack of adherence to emerging standards concerning the lifecycle of home game consoles produced hardware that did not fit onto the “continuum of experiences” so crucial to Sega's earlier success.<br />
<br />
===Saturn===<br />
<br />
[[File:Egmsept97backcover.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Advertisement for World Series Baseball '98.]]<br />
<br />
Over 1994 and 1995, Sega released its standalone 32-bit system, the [[Sega Saturn]]. Launched with numerous arcade ports and rushed to market in attempt to repeat the Genesis' success at beating competitors to market, Sega “miscalculated how quickly it [Saturn] would erode demand” for the Genesis. Within a year of Saturn's launch, “Sega of America took huge losses worldwide on warehouses full of unsold 16-bit games” (De Peuter 141).<br />
<br />
Saturn, though more popular than 32x or Sega CD, was still commercially unsuccessful. The system did not launch with a family-friendly franchise title like Sonic the Hedgehog, effectively ignoring gender and age diversity of home console consumers.<br />
<br />
However, much as certain filmmakers, reacting against “primacy of women cinemagoers” (Kittler 178) in determining a film's commercial success, originated the “masculine auteur film” (ibid), Sega's in-house software developers produced critically successful games such as NiGHTs into Dreams, a re-imagination of the two-dimensional platform genre in what came to be known as “2.5D” style. Gameplay takes place two axes much like a two-dimensional game, but is presented with from a viewpoint that moves through environments on all three axes. <br />
<br />
By 1998, however, Sega's market share against competitors Nintendo and Sony had dwindled to nine percent (De Peuter 141), as its aggressively masculine products failed to integrate with the changing home console market. Sega ignored the “very empirical” (Kittler 176) evidence of an age- and gender- diverse audience developing around the intersection of television and computer gaming, thus neglecting the era's emergent hybridity with cinematic content and audiences in increasingly general-purpose home theaters.<br />
<br />
=== The Dreamcast ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Dcmnov99p46sonic.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for Sonic Adventure. Sega, Sonic Team, 1999. Note the accusation that readers possess 'lame-ass reflexes'.]]<br />
<br />
In 1999, Sega launched its final home console, the [[Sega Dreamcast]]. Sega's first console to be designed in white rather than black plastic, it appeared initially as though the system could feminize Sega's product line, thus expanding its marketability to family audiences.<br />
<br />
Supporting this first impression, the Dreamcat launched with a family-friendly Sonic franchise game called Sonic Adventure. Sonic Adventure also used the Dreamcast's removable storage/display unit, the “VMU” to distribute a virtual pet minigame, playable on-the-go and similar to a [[Tamagotchi]].<br />
<br />
These apparent concessions to a television-watching living-room market did not carry across most of Dreamcast's other software or promotional materials, however. The system was promoted primarily to “14- to 24-year old dudes” (EGM Sept99 p174) at rock concerts and in inner cities, ostensibly targeting the demographic of “semidelinquent technophile” originally present both in arcades and “at the very origin of gaming's Pentagon-sponsored inception” (De Peuter 91).<br />
<br />
Just before the Dreamcast launched in 1999, Sega of America President Bernie Stolar described his business plan in the following terms:<br />
<br />
“...the next two Christmases for us are to show everyone that Sega is a leading company, and that Sega has the best software in the marketplace” (EGM 174)<br />
<br />
What did not factor into that plan was synergy with home theater hardware-- Sony's PlayStation2, launched in 2000, doubled as a DVD movie player, thus moving closer to what Friedrich Kittler might call a “general medium” (224), and certainly closer to a standard living-room appliance.<br />
<br />
Sega continued to offer primarily arcade ports and auteur games until the Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001.<br />
<br />
== Postmortem ==<br />
<br />
=== Competition, Arcades, and the Internet ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segachannel.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for the Sega Channel, 1995]]<br />
<br />
Sega's home console division displayed considerable reliance reliance upon competitive arcade games and masculine auteur software with obvious military-industrial origins. These offerings came into marketplace conflict with various more effective “public dissimulations” in the business of “mystifying or denying” (De Peuter 181) such origins.<br />
<br />
Despite any qualitative 'gameplay value' present in Sega home products, their competitors' products possessed the symbolic value of rendering video gaming appropriate to a home theater environment. Achieved intertextually through synergy between hardware design, software curation, marketing, and various other actions of “cultural intermediaries” (De Peuter 82). Rather than replacing “the mass consumers in the cinema hall with a single, lonely cybernaut” (Kittler 227) as had been done in their successful arcade and auteur games, Sega's competitors cinematized gaming for a mass audience. Game systems like Microsoft's X-Box and Sony's PlayStation2 added a new dimension of value to their products by providing DVD movie functionality in their machines, further dissimulating their military origins.<br />
<br />
In contrast, Sega undertook a number of costly experiments with online gaming during the lifespan of their home hardware division, attempting to capitalize upon “digital connectivity between many players (usually in their homes) who remain physically separated and isolated” (Burrill 62), enabling a type of dehumanized competitive sociality in a “clear extension of the arcade” (ibid).<br />
<br />
The experiments included [[Sega Channel]], a cable-tv add-on subscription service which provided about 50 Genesis games a month on a premium-channel pay format, and SegaNet, a 56k multiplayer network created in conjunction with AT&T for the Dreamcast. Both were unsuccessful, possibly because they relied on non-standard uses of technology. Sega Channel required extra hardware and a re-purposing of cable TV infrastructure, while SegaNet, despite Sega of America marketing director Charles Bellfield's claims that “There will be no problems on latency issues” (EGM 193), relied upon a [[56k modem]] to connect players over phone lines despite the emerging standards of broadband internet among online gamers.<br />
<br />
The Dreamcast hardware, however, lives on in the form of Sega's NAOMI arcade architecture, one of the most long-living arcade systems in history. Sega continues to produce both arcade and home software despite the defunctness of its home hardware division.<br />
<br />
=== Emulation ===<br />
<br />
Because Sega's home hardware systems have all been discontinued, very little software remains in print to accompany them. This presents numerous difficulties to enthusiasts, researchers and historians hoping to play them. The majority of activity concerning discontinued software and hardware for Sega's home systems happens through unofficial homebrew releases and emulators.<br />
<br />
The semidelinquent “antiheros” of video game history, have also developed the skills and tools necessary to be “productive of [themselves]” (Burrill 124), becoming “the code, the coder and the decoder” (ibid). Communities of enthusiasts began producing Dreamcast programs capable of running other home console games and new unofficial software releases before it was even discontinued, and numerous emulation projects that run on home computers existed even earlier.<br />
<br />
In 2006, Sega began offering official emulations of certain 'classic' games through the online Wii Virtual Console (Parish np)-- completing a circuit between arcades, Sega home consoles, masculine enthusiast-tinkerers and the “General Medium” of a broadband-enabled home console.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Works Cited ==<br />
<br />
Burrill, Derek A. "Die Tryin': Video Games, Masculinity, Culture", 2008. Peter Lang, New York.<br />
<br />
DeMaria, Rusel and Johnny L. Wilson. "High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games", 2002. McGraw Hill/Osborne, Berkeley CA.<br />
<br />
De Peuter, Greig, Stephen Kline and Nick Dyer-Witheford. "Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing", 2003. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal QC.<br />
<br />
"It's Here, But Should You Buy One?" Electronic Gaming Monthly, September 1999. p168-175.<br />
<br />
Kittler, Friedrich. "Optical Media", 2010. Polity Press, Malden MA.<br />
<br />
Kohler, Chris. "Playing the SG-1000, Sega's First Game Machine". http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/10/sega-sg-1000/. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
Parish, Jeremy. "The Best Virtual Console Wii Games". http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3154803. Accessed November 13, 2010.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Fall 2010]] [[Category:Video Games]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Home_Video_Game_Consoles&diff=11735Sega Home Video Game Consoles2010-11-13T23:01:45Z<p>Jah450: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:Rez_ingame.jpg|right|thumb|300pix|Screenshot from REZ, Sonic Team/Sega 2001.]]<br />
<br />
////This dossier is currently in pre-beta stage. Please return on SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2010 to view the completed text complete with pretty pictures and revised/edited text.<br />
<br />
Sega Enterprises, LTD released five standalone home video game systems between 1983 and 1999, all of which are currently discontinued. The aim of this dossier is not provide an exhaustive analysis of all Sega's dead media platforms, but rather to provide an overview of the company's home console division which serves as a portal for further investigation of its specific products. This dossier is concerned in particular with tracing the causes of Sega home systems' death and its relation to the ongoing negotiation between video games' military and arcade oriented genealogy as they adapt to domestic settings. <br />
<br />
In addition, this survey of Sega's large and obsolete body of products is an attempt to promote the archival and investigation of various obsolete video game technologies' historical importance to developing standards in the production, distribution, and experience of media technologies.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Origins ==<br />
<br />
=== Service Games: a Military-Industrial Entertainment Business ===<br />
<br />
The origins of Sega home video game consoles can be traced to David Rosen, a U.S. Air Force veteran who had been stationed in Japan. He began “a company in Japan named Rosen Enterprises that imported pinball machines as entertainment from the US” (De Peuter 91) after World War II. Rosen Enterprises merged with another American/Japanese amusement company in 1965 called Service Games.<br />
<br />
After merging, Service Games's name was shortened to Sega. In 1967, the company began producing its own mechanical arcade games for placement in Sega brand arcade locations around Japan.<br />
<br />
=== Arcade Gaming ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Altbeastplay.png|right|400pix|thumb|Altered Beast arcade screenshot. Sega, 1988.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:SpaceHarrier_arcadeflyer.png|right|400pix|thumb|Promotional flier for Space Harrier. Sega AM2, 1985.]]<br />
<br />
Sega progenitor David Rosen recalls of early Sega arcade games: “The first game we built was Rifleman. Our first big hit was Periscope … From 1967 through 1979 we manufactured 140 different games” (DeMaria 233). Sega's earliest original productions played upon a number of militant and masculine tropes, including what media theorist Friedrich Kittler calls “structural correspondence between perspective and ballistics” (186).<br />
<br />
Cinematized representations of gunplay and marksmanship, popularized and formalized in wartime film, create “intertextual representative experiences”-- in this case “predicated on the player having existing knowledge … of how this specific type of action/spy hero masculinity is 'supposed' to operate” (Burrill 1), which includes aiming and firing weapons, identifying enemies, and basic visual familiarity with military machinery.<br />
<br />
Tapping into the culture of competition and masculinity inherited from the armed forces, Sega rooted its business model in facilitating “feats of strength and skill based on pain and violence” which produced and reproduced “male codes of power” (Burrill 6) in arcades. This militant approach to gaming was maintained throughout Sega's arcade and home offerings through the end of the 20th century.<br />
<br />
Doug Glen, Sega's VP of Business Development and Strategic Planning in the 1990's, described their business model in the following terms: <br />
<br />
“We look at it as a continuum of experience. You can leverage the asset from the highest end down to the mass market-- the home. We get into the leading edge and nurture the experience throughout the various manifestations” (De Peuter 137)<br />
<br />
For Sega, arcades constituted the 'leading edge' or 'highest end', while home systems provided an extension of the arcade experience for home markets. This emphasis on arcades and the audiences of “semidelinquent technophile” (Burrill 7) they catered to prevented Sega from developing home consoles and software that could gain popularity with domestic audiences of varied gender and taste. <br />
<br />
=== Sega SG-1000 & Sega Master System ===<br />
<br />
Sega released its first home video game console, the SG-1000 in Japan on the same day in 1983 that Nintendo launched its FamiCom (short for “Family Computer”, marketed in the US as Nintendo Entertainment System or NES). The SG-1000 was never released outside of Asia, where numerous third-party add-ons of dubious legality enabled it to play games for competing Colecovision and Atari 2600 systems.<br />
<br />
The system architecture was cloned and re-released by multiple companies beside Sega. (Wired) The SG-1000's software and marketing were primarily concerned with re-mediating prior games and consoles, and the revenue from hardware sales was split between Sega and multiple other manufacturers. This lack of quality control was not unique to Sega and is widely credited with causing a video game industry crash in 1984.<br />
<br />
In 1985, Sega released the Sega Master System, an 8-bit system designed to compete more effectively with Nintendo's NES. David Rosen recalls: <br />
<br />
“after the game market collapse [in 1984]… the industry was fairly well written off. We had a product in the pipeline, but we had put it on the shelf. We took it off the shelf when we saw what was happening with Nintendo. But we were a year behind Nintendo and that was a very difficult hurdle to overcome” (DeMaria 234).<br />
<br />
The Sega Master System did not achieve notable success in Sega's primary markets (Japan and North America). It did, however, become popular in secondary markets, most notably Brazil and Europe, where consumers were less exposed to competing products. The possibility of marketing to underserved populations was thus revealed, and Sega repeated this approach, in certain ways, with its next console.<br />
<br />
== The 1990's ==<br />
<br />
===Genesis/Megadrive===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segacd32x.jpg|thumb|200pix|right|Fig. 2. A 2nd generation Sega Mega Drive with Mega CD and 32x attachments.]]<br />
<br />
[[File:Sonic1_box_usa.jpg|thumb|100pix|right|US packaging art for Sonic the Hedgehog]]<br />
<br />
<br />
“...initial NES players had gotten older and entered their teens. Their systems ended up in closets. They discovered girls. So we positioned Genesis as the product you graduated to. Once you put away your toys, you got Sega. And we gave them arcade games and sports” – Al Nilson, Sega of America Director of Marketing on launching the Genesis/Megadrive. (DeMaria 244)<br />
<br />
Between 1988 and 1989 Sega rolled out a 16-bit system in North America, Japan, and Europe. It was marketed as Sega Genesis in North America and Sega Mega Drive elsewhere. The system launched with ports of popular Sega arcade games like Golden Axe and Altered Beast, despite the fact that it “Looked like devil worship in the midwest” (DeMaria 247), according to Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske.<br />
<br />
The competitive games ported from Sega's arcade machines effectively provided “a sphere for bodily action as well as one in which the subject [could] fight off the looming threat of absent technologies” (Burrill 6), including home video games and computers, which recontextualized video gaming's arcade and military origins through “concealment, intimacy, [and] internalization” (Burril 3) in a mass-market domestic product. The Genesis is an example of domesticated technology providing a way for users to perform feats of power with military origins in the home, enabled by mass-market home television sets.<br />
With the Genesis, Sega helped usher in an era of 'console wars' against Nintendo. In order to compete with Nintendo's entrenched dominance in the home market, Sega produced home software that would expand upon the “Platform” genre of games defined by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers. These “cutesy jump 'n run games”, contain “a wide mix of gameplay elements” and include “identifiable characters and heroes”, thus deflecting some of the “controversy associated with more violent and disturbing game genres” (De Peuter 117) popular in arcades.<br />
<br />
Sega's character-driven platform game Sonic the Hedgehog, launched with the Genesis, featured a cartoon protagonist reminiscent of Bart Simpson and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, already popular with children and families on television. Simultaneously, Sonic the Hedgehog enabled players to navigate levels at a much higher speed than prior platform games, expanding the possibility for arcade-style displays of reflexes and prowess in home software.<br />
<br />
This two-tiered approach to software combined appeals to both military-industrial and domesticated video game tastes, though it leaned heavily on Sega's past in the military entertainment business. The Genesis hardware and marketing thereof was also thoroughly steeped in the culture of aggression that characterized Sega's entrepreneurial, arcade, and military origins. <br />
<br />
Because of the Nintendo NES's position of dominance in the home console marketplace of 1988, the company was “reluctant to innovate and vulnerable to being technologically leapfrogged” (De Peuter 129). Sega “followed the logic of the perpetual innovation economy” (ibid), engineering a console which could more faithfully reproduce the graphics of both arcade games and cartoon heroes than its competitors. <br />
<br />
Reliance on this type of blitzkrieg development toward new technological standards, a holdover from Sega's origins within the military-industrial economy, was a significant and recurring theme throughout the life cycle of their home hardware endeavors, contributing to their difficulty adapting to a rapidly domesticating home game market. <br />
<br />
==== Sega CD and 32x ====<br />
<br />
[[File:Night_Trap_Cover.jpg|right|thumb|US Box art for Night Trap. Digital Pictures/Sega 1992.]]<br />
<br />
The first suggestions that Sega was too aggressively masculine to continue its success in the home market arrived in the form of add-on hardware for the Genesis. The Sega CD (Mega CD in Europe and Japan), released in different markets between 1991 and 1993, was the second compact disc based home system commercially available. Most of its software relied heavily on digitized video of live actors, enabled by the CD's superior storage capabilities in comparison to the dominant medium of cartridges.<br />
<br />
“Standards determine how media reach our senses” (Kittler 36).<br />
<br />
CD-enabled full motion video game software on the Sega CD presented a shift from Sega's arcade roots, requiring that players spent much of their game-time watching video clips and not directly influencing on-screen actions. The Sega CD complicated Sega's already precarious balance between home and arcade game standards by adding an additional conflict between the emerging standards of computer cd-rom gaming and home theatre applications of CD storage technology. <br />
<br />
Without strong standards in place, the new format of CD FMV (full-motion video) games brought grainy video onto the television, heavily letterboxed and thus drawing attention to the “peep show character” (Kittler 223) of its small field of vision.<br />
<br />
The next add-on to hit markets dead-on-arrival was the 32x, a cartridge-based peripheral which piggybacked extra processors with the Genesis' original hardware. Released just months before its well-publicized standalone 32-bit CD-based system, the Saturn, however, little attention was paid to 32x by gamers or software developers. Again, lack of adherence to emerging standards concerning the lifecycle of home game consoles produced hardware that did not fit onto the “continuum of experiences” so crucial to Sega's earlier success.<br />
<br />
===Saturn===<br />
<br />
[[File:Egmsept97backcover.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Advertisement for World Series Baseball '98.]]<br />
<br />
Over 1994 and 1995, Sega released its standalone 32-bit system, the Sega Saturn. Launched with numerous arcade ports and rushed to market in attempt to repeat the Genesis' success at beating competitors to market, Sega “miscalculated how quickly it [Saturn] would erode demand” for the Genesis. Within a year of Saturn's launch, “Sega of America took huge losses worldwide on warehouses full of unsold 16-bit games” (De Peuter 141).<br />
<br />
Saturn, though more popular than 32x or Sega CD, was still commercially unsuccessful. The system did not launch with a family-friendly franchise title like Sonic the Hedgehog, effectively ignoring gender and age diversity of home console consumers.<br />
<br />
However, much as certain filmmakers, reacting against “primacy of women cinemagoers” (Kittler 178) in determining a film's commercial success, originated the “masculine auteur film” (ibid), Sega's in-house software developers produced critically successful games such as NiGHTs into Dreams, a re-imagination of the two-dimensional platform genre in what came to be known as “2.5D” style. Gameplay takes place two axes much like a two-dimensional game, but is presented with from a viewpoint that moves through environments on all three axes. <br />
<br />
By 1998, however, Sega's market share against competitors Nintendo and Sony had dwindled to nine percent (De Peuter 141), as its aggressively masculine products failed to integrate with the changing home console market. Sega ignored the “very empirical” (Kittler 176) evidence of an age- and gender- diverse audience developing around the intersection of television and computer gaming, thus neglecting the era's emergent hybridity with cinematic content and audiences in increasingly general-purpose home theaters.<br />
<br />
=== The Dreamcast ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Dcmnov99p46sonic.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for Sonic Adventure. Sega, Sonic Team, 1999. Note the accusation that readers possess 'lame-ass reflexes'.]]<br />
<br />
In 1999, Sega launched its final home console, the Dreamcast. Sega's first console to be designed in white rather than black plastic, it appeared initially as though the system could feminize Sega's product line, thus expanding its marketability to family audiences.<br />
<br />
Supporting this first impression, the Dreamcat launched with a family-friendly Sonic franchise game called Sonic Adventure. Sonic Adventure also used the Dreamcast's removable storage/display unit, the “VMU” to distribute a virtual pet minigame, playable on-the-go and similar to a [[Tamagotchi]].<br />
<br />
These apparent concessions to a television-watching living-room market did not carry across most of Dreamcast's other software or promotional materials, however. The system was promoted primarily to “14- to 24-year old dudes” (EGM Sept99 p174) at rock concerts and in inner cities, ostensibly targeting the demographic of “semidelinquent technophile” originally present both in arcades and “at the very origin of gaming's Pentagon-sponsored inception” (De Peuter 91).<br />
<br />
Just before the Dreamcast launched in 1999, Sega of America President Bernie Stolar described his business plan in the following terms:<br />
<br />
“...the next two Christmases for us are to show everyone that Sega is a leading company, and that Sega has the best software in the marketplace” (EGM 174)<br />
<br />
What did not factor into that plan was synergy with home theater hardware-- Sony's PlayStation2, launched in 2000, doubled as a DVD movie player, thus moving closer to what Friedrich Kittler might call a “general medium” (224), and certainly closer to a standard living-room appliance.<br />
<br />
Sega continued to offer primarily arcade ports and auteur games until the Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001.<br />
<br />
== Postmortem ==<br />
<br />
=== Competition, Arcades, and the Internet ===<br />
<br />
[[File:Segachannel.jpg|thumb|400pix|right|Ad for the Sega Channel, 1995]]<br />
<br />
Sega's home console division displayed considerable reliance reliance upon competitive arcade games and masculine auteur software with obvious military-industrial origins. These offerings came into marketplace conflict with various more effective “public dissimulations” in the business of “mystifying or denying” (De Peuter 181) such origins.<br />
<br />
Despite any qualitative 'gameplay value' present in Sega home products, their competitors' products possessed the symbolic value of rendering video gaming appropriate to a home theater environment. Achieved intertextually through synergy between hardware design, software curation, marketing, and various other actions of “cultural intermediaries” (De Peuter 82). Rather than replacing “the mass consumers in the cinema hall with a single, lonely cybernaut” (Kittler 227) as had been done in their successful arcade and auteur games, Sega's competitors cinematized gaming for a mass audience. Game systems like Microsoft's X-Box and Sony's PlayStation2 added a new dimension of value to their products by providing DVD movie functionality in their machines, further dissimulating their military origins.<br />
<br />
In contrast, Sega undertook a number of costly experiments with online gaming during the lifespan of their home hardware division, attempting to capitalize upon “digital connectivity between many players (usually in their homes) who remain physically separated and isolated” (Burrill 62), enabling a type of dehumanized competitive sociality in a “clear extension of the arcade” (ibid).<br />
<br />
The experiments included Sega Channel, a cable-tv add-on subscription service which provided about 50 Genesis games a month on a premium-channel pay format, and SegaNet, a 56k multiplayer network created in conjunction with AT&T for the Dreamcast. Both were unsuccessful, possibly because they relied on non-standard uses of technology. Sega Channel required extra hardware and a re-purposing of cable TV infrastructure, while SegaNet, despite Sega of America marketing director Charles Bellfield's claims that “There will be no problems on latency issues” (EGM 193), relied upon 56k phone-line modems to connect players despite the emerging standards of broadband internet among online gamers.<br />
<br />
The Dreamcast hardware, however, lives on in the form of Sega's NAOMI arcade architecture, one of the most long-living arcade systems in history. Sega continues to produce both arcade and home software despite the defunctness of its home hardware division.<br />
<br />
=== Emulation ===<br />
<br />
Because Sega's home hardware systems have all been discontinued, very little software remains in print to accompany them. This presents numerous difficulties to enthusiasts, researchers and historians hoping to play them. The majority of activity concerning discontinued software and hardware for Sega's home systems happens through unofficial homebrew releases and emulators.<br />
<br />
The semidelinquent “antiheros” of video game history, have also developed the skills and tools necessary to be “productive of [themselves]” (Burrill 124), becoming “the code, the coder and the decoder” (ibid). Communities of enthusiasts began producing Dreamcast programs capable of running other home console games and new unofficial software releases before it was even discontinued, and numerous emulation projects that run on home computers existed even earlier.<br />
<br />
In 2006, Sega began offering official emulations of certain 'classic' games through the online Wii Virtual Console-- completing a circuit between arcades, Sega home consoles, masculine enthusiast-tinkerers and the “General Medium” of a broadband-enabled home console.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Works Cited ==<br />
<br />
Burrill, Derek A. "Die Tryin': Video Games, Masculinity, Culture", 2008. Peter Lang, New York.<br />
<br />
DeMaria, Rusel and Johnny L. Wilson. "High Score: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games", 2002. McGraw Hill/Osborne, Berkeley CA.<br />
<br />
De Peuter, Greig, Stephen Kline and Nick Dyer-Witheford. "Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing", 2003. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal QC.<br />
<br />
Kittler, Friedrich. "Optical Media", 2010. Polity Press, Malden MA.<br />
<br />
"It's Here, But Should You Buy One?" Electronic Gaming Monthly, September 1999. p168-175.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Fall 2010]] [[Category:Video Games]]</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Night_Trap_Cover.jpg&diff=11734File:Night Trap Cover.jpg2010-11-13T22:44:10Z<p>Jah450: North American box art for Night Trap, Digital Pictures/Sega 1992. From WikiMedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Night_Trap_Cover.jpg</p>
<hr />
<div>North American box art for Night Trap, Digital Pictures/Sega 1992. From WikiMedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Night_Trap_Cover.jpg</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Rez_ingame.jpg&diff=11733File:Rez ingame.jpg2010-11-13T22:36:13Z<p>Jah450: Screenshot from REZ, Sonic Team/Sega. 2001, Dreamcast. From WikiMedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rez_ingame.jpg</p>
<hr />
<div>Screenshot from REZ, Sonic Team/Sega. 2001, Dreamcast. From WikiMedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rez_ingame.jpg</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:SpaceHarrier_arcadeflyer.png&diff=11732File:SpaceHarrier arcadeflyer.png2010-11-13T22:22:16Z<p>Jah450: Japanese arcade flier for Space Harrier (Sega AM2, 1985). From WikiMedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SpaceHarrier_arcadeflyer.png</p>
<hr />
<div>Japanese arcade flier for Space Harrier (Sega AM2, 1985). From WikiMedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SpaceHarrier_arcadeflyer.png</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Sonic1_box_usa.jpg&diff=11731File:Sonic1 box usa.jpg2010-11-13T22:12:49Z<p>Jah450: Cover to Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega, 1991) US Release. From WikiMedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sonic1_box_usa.jpg</p>
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<div>Cover to Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega, 1991) US Release. From WikiMedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sonic1_box_usa.jpg</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Altbeastplay.png&diff=11730File:Altbeastplay.png2010-11-13T22:07:22Z<p>Jah450: Altered Beast, 1988, Sega. Arcade Screenshot. From WikiMedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Altbeastplay.png</p>
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<div>Altered Beast, 1988, Sega. Arcade Screenshot. From WikiMedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Altbeastplay.png</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=Sega_Home_Video_Game_Consoles&diff=11729Sega Home Video Game Consoles2010-11-13T21:57:18Z<p>Jah450: </p>
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<div>*********//////HELLO<br />
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/////This dossier is currently in pre-beta stage. Please return on SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2010 to view the completed text complete with pretty pictures and revised/edited text.<br />
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Sega Enterprises, LTD released five standalone home video game systems between 1983 and 1999, all of which are currently discontinued. The aim of this dossier is not provide an exhaustive analysis of all Sega's dead media platforms, but rather to provide an overview of the company's home console division which serves as a portal for further investigation of its specific products. This dossier is concerned in particular with tracing the causes of Sega home systems' death and its relation to the ongoing negotiation between video games' military and arcade oriented genealogy as they adapt to domestic settings. <br />
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In addition, this survey of Sega's large and obsolete body of products is an attempt to promote the archival and investigation of various obsolete video game technologies' historical importance to developing standards in the production, distribution, and experience of media technologies.<br />
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== Origins ==<br />
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=== Service Games: a Military-Industrial Entertainment Business ===<br />
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The origins of Sega home video game consoles can be traced to David Rosen, a U.S. Air Force veteran who had been stationed in Japan. He began “a company in Japan named Rosen Enterprises that imported pinball machines as entertainment from the US” (De Peuter 91) after World War II. Rosen Enterprises merged with another American/Japanese amusement company in 1965 called Service Games.<br />
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After merging, Service Games's name was shortened to Sega. In 1967, the company began producing its own mechanical arcade games for placement in Sega brand arcade locations around Japan.<br />
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=== Arcade Gaming ===<br />
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[[File:Harrier.jpg|200pix|thumb|left|Advertisement for Space Harrier]]<br />
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Sega progenitor David Rosen recalls of early Sega arcade games: “The first game we built was Rifleman. Our first big hit was Periscope … From 1967 through 1979 we manufactured 140 different games” (DeMaria 233). Sega's earliest original productions played upon a number of militant and masculine tropes, including what media theorist Friedrich Kittler calls “structural correspondence between perspective and ballistics” (186).<br />
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Cinematized representations of gunplay and marksmanship, popularized and formalized in wartime film, create “intertextual representative experiences”-- in this case “predicated on the player having existing knowledge … of how this specific type of action/spy hero masculinity is 'supposed' to operate” (Burrill 1), which includes aiming and firing weapons, identifying enemies, and basic visual familiarity with military machinery.<br />
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Tapping into the culture of competition and masculinity inherited from the armed forces, Sega rooted its business model in facilitating “feats of strength and skill based on pain and violence” which produced and reproduced “male codes of power” (Burrill 6) in arcades. This militant approach to gaming was maintained throughout Sega's arcade and home offerings through the end of the 20th century.<br />
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Doug Glen, Sega's VP of Business Development and Strategic Planning in the 1990's, described their business model in the following terms: <br />
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“We look at it as a continuum of experience. You can leverage the asset from the highest end down to the mass market-- the home. We get into the leading edge and nurture the experience throughout the various manifestations” (De Peuter 137)<br />
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For Sega, arcades constituted the 'leading edge' or 'highest end', while home systems provided an extension of the arcade experience for home markets. This emphasis on arcades and the audiences of “semidelinquent technophile” (Burrill 7) they catered to prevented Sega from developing home consoles and software that could gain popularity with domestic audiences of varied gender and taste. <br />
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=== Sega SG-1000 & Sega Master System ===<br />
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Sega released its first home video game console, the SG-1000 in Japan on the same day in 1983 that Nintendo launched its FamiCom (short for “Family Computer”, marketed in the US as Nintendo Entertainment System or NES). The SG-1000 was never released outside of Asia, where numerous third-party add-ons of dubious legality enabled it to play games for competing Colecovision and Atari 2600 systems.<br />
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The system architecture was cloned and re-released by multiple companies beside Sega. (Wired) The SG-1000's software and marketing were primarily concerned with re-mediating prior games and consoles, and the revenue from hardware sales was split between Sega and multiple other manufacturers. This lack of quality control was not unique to Sega and is widely credited with causing a video game industry crash in 1984.<br />
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In 1985, Sega released the Sega Master System, an 8-bit system designed to compete more effectively with Nintendo's NES. David Rosen recalls: <br />
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“after the game market collapse [in 1984]… the industry was fairly well written off. We had a product in the pipeline, but we had put it on the shelf. We took it off the shelf when we saw what was happening with Nintendo. But we were a year behind Nintendo and that was a very difficult hurdle to overcome” (DeMaria 234).<br />
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The Sega Master System did not achieve notable success in Sega's primary markets (Japan and North America). It did, however, become popular in secondary markets, most notably Brazil and Europe, where consumers were less exposed to competing products. The possibility of marketing to underserved populations was thus revealed, and Sega repeated this approach, in certain ways, with its next console.<br />
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== The 1990's ==<br />
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===Genesis/Megadrive===<br />
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[[File:Segacd32x.jpg|thumb|200pix|right|A 2nd generation Sega Mega Drive with Mega CD and 32x attachments.]]<br />
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“...initial NES players had gotten older and entered their teens. Their systems ended up in closets. They discovered girls. So we positioned Genesis as the product you graduated to. Once you put away your toys, you got Sega. And we gave them arcade games and sports” – Al Nilson, Sega of America Director of Marketing on launching the Genesis/Megadrive. (DeMaria 244)<br />
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Between 1988 and 1989 Sega rolled out a 16-bit system in North America, Japan, and Europe. It was marketed as Sega Genesis in North America and Sega Mega Drive elsewhere. The system launched with ports of popular Sega arcade games like Golden Axe and Altered Beast, despite the fact that it “Looked like devil worship in the midwest” (DeMaria 247), according to Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske.<br />
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The competitive games ported from Sega's arcade machines effectively provided “a sphere for bodily action as well as one in which the subject [could] fight off the looming threat of absent technologies” (Burrill 6), including home video games and computers, which recontextualized video gaming's arcade and military origins through “concealment, intimacy, [and] internalization” (Burril 3) in a mass-market domestic product. The Genesis is an example of domesticated technology providing a way for users to perform feats of power with military origins in the home, enabled by mass-market home television sets.<br />
With the Genesis, Sega helped usher in an era of 'console wars' against Nintendo. In order to compete with Nintendo's entrenched dominance in the home market, Sega produced home software that would expand upon the “Platform” genre of games defined by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers. These “cutesy jump 'n run games”, contain “a wide mix of gameplay elements” and include “identifiable characters and heroes”, thus deflecting some of the “controversy associated with more violent and disturbing game genres” (De Peuter 117) popular in arcades.<br />
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Sega's character-driven platform game Sonic the Hedgehog, launched with the Genesis, featured a cartoon protagonist reminiscent of Bart Simpson and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, already popular with children and families on television. Simultaneously, Sonic the Hedgehog enabled players to navigate levels at a much higher speed than prior platform games, expanding the possibility for arcade-style displays of reflexes and prowess in home software.<br />
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This two-tiered approach to software combined appeals to both military-industrial and domesticated video game tastes, though it leaned heavily on Sega's past in the military entertainment business. The Genesis hardware and marketing thereof was also thoroughly steeped in the culture of aggression that characterized Sega's entrepreneurial, arcade, and military origins. <br />
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Because of the Nintendo NES's position of dominance in the home console marketplace of 1988, the company was “reluctant to innovate and vulnerable to being technologically leapfrogged” (De Peuter 129). Sega “followed the logic of the perpetual innovation economy” (ibid), engineering a console which could more faithfully reproduce the graphics of both arcade games and cartoon heroes than its competitors. <br />
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Reliance on this type of blitzkrieg development toward new technological standards, a holdover from Sega's origins within the military-industrial economy, was a significant and recurring theme throughout the life cycle of their home hardware endeavors, contributing to their difficulty adapting to a rapidly domesticating home game market. <br />
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[[File:Segachannel.jpg|200pix|thumb|Left|An advertisement for Sega Channel]]<br />
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==== Sega CD and 32x ====<br />
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The first suggestions that Sega was too aggressively masculine to continue its success in the home market arrived in the form of add-on hardware for the Genesis. The Sega CD (Mega CD in Europe and Japan), released in different markets between 1991 and 1993, was the second compact disc based home system commercially available. Most of its software relied heavily on digitized video of live actors, enabled by the CD's superior storage capabilities in comparison to the dominant medium of cartridges.<br />
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“Standards determine how media reach our senses” (Kittler 36).<br />
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CD-enabled full motion video game software on the Sega CD presented a shift from Sega's arcade roots, requiring that players spent much of their game-time watching video clips and not directly influencing on-screen actions. The Sega CD complicated Sega's already precarious balance between home and arcade game standards by adding an additional conflict between the emerging standards of computer cd-rom gaming and home theatre applications of CD storage technology. <br />
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Without strong standards in place, the new format of CD FMV (full-motion video) games brought grainy video onto the television, heavily letterboxed and thus drawing attention to the “peep show character” (Kittler 223) of its small field of vision.<br />
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The next add-on to hit markets dead-on-arrival was the 32x, a cartridge-based peripheral which piggybacked extra processors with the Genesis' original hardware. Released just months before its well-publicized standalone 32-bit CD-based system, the Saturn, however, little attention was paid to 32x by gamers or software developers. Again, lack of adherence to emerging standards concerning the lifecycle of home game consoles produced hardware that did not fit onto the “continuum of experiences” so crucial to Sega's earlier success.<br />
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===Saturn===<br />
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Over 1994 and 1995, Sega released its standalone 32-bit system, the Sega Saturn. Launched with numerous arcade ports and rushed to market in attempt to repeat the Genesis' success at beating competitors to market, Sega “miscalculated how quickly it [Saturn] would erode demand” for the Genesis. Within a year of Saturn's launch, “Sega of America took huge losses worldwide on warehouses full of unsold 16-bit games” (De Peuter 141).<br />
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Saturn, though more popular than 32x or Sega CD, was still commercially unsuccessful. The system did not launch with a family-friendly franchise title like Sonic the Hedgehog, effectively ignoring gender and age diversity of home console consumers.<br />
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However, much as certain filmmakers, reacting against “primacy of women cinemagoers” (Kittler 178) in determining a film's commercial success, originated the “masculine auteur film” (ibid), Sega's in-house software developers produced critically successful games such as NiGHTs into Dreams, a re-imagination of the two-dimensional platform genre in what came to be known as “2.5D” style. Gameplay takes place two axes much like a two-dimensional game, but is presented with from a viewpoint that moves through environments on all three axes. <br />
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By 1998, however, Sega's market share against competitors Nintendo and Sony had dwindled to nine percent (De Peuter 141), as its aggressively masculine products failed to integrate with the changing home console market. Sega ignored the “very empirical” (Kittler 176) evidence of an age- and gender- diverse audience developing around the intersection of television and computer gaming, thus neglecting the era's emergent hybridity with cinematic content and audiences in increasingly general-purpose home theaters.<br />
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=== The Dreamcast ===<br />
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In 1999, Sega launched its final home console, the Dreamcast. Sega's first console to be designed in white rather than black plastic, it appeared initially as though the system could feminize Sega's product line, thus expanding its marketability to family audiences.<br />
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Supporting this first impression, the Dreamcat launched with a family-friendly Sonic franchise game called Sonic Adventure. Sonic Adventure also used the Dreamcast's removable storage/display unit, the “VMU” to distribute a virtual pet minigame, playable on-the-go and similar to a Tamagotchi.<br />
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These apparent concessions to a television-watching living-room market did not carry across most of Dreamcast's other software or promotional materials, however. The system was promoted primarily to “14- to 24-year old dudes” (EGM Sept99 p174) at rock concerts and in inner cities, ostensibly targeting the demographic of “semidelinquent technophile” originally present both in arcades and “at the very origin of gaming's Pentagon-sponsored inception” (De Peuter 91).<br />
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Just before the Dreamcast launched in 1999, Sega of America President Bernie Stolar described his business plan in the following terms:<br />
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“...the next two Christmases for us are to show everyone that Sega is a leading company, and that Sega has the best software in the marketplace” (EGM 174)<br />
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What did not factor into that plan was synergy with home theater hardware-- Sony's PlayStation2, launched in 2000, doubled as a DVD movie player, thus moving closer to what Friedrich Kittler might call a “general medium” (224), and certainly closer to a standard living-room appliance.<br />
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Sega continued to offer primarily arcade ports and auteur games until the Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001.<br />
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== Postmortem ==<br />
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=== Competition, Arcades, and the Internet ===<br />
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Sega's home console division displayed considerable reliance reliance upon competitive arcade games and masculine auteur software with obvious military-industrial origins. These offerings came into marketplace conflict with various more effective “public dissimulations” in the business of “mystifying or denying” (De Peuter 181) such origins.<br />
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Despite any qualitative 'gameplay value' present in Sega home products, their competitors' products possessed the symbolic value of rendering video gaming appropriate to a home theater environment. Achieved intertextually through synergy between hardware design, software curation, marketing, and various other actions of “cultural intermediaries” (De Peuter 82). Rather than replacing “the mass consumers in the cinema hall with a single, lonely cybernaut” (Kittler 227) as had been done in their successful arcade and auteur games, Sega's competitors cinematized gaming for a mass audience. Game systems like Microsoft's X-Box and Sony's PlayStation2 added a new dimension of value to their products by providing DVD movie functionality in their machines, further dissimulating their military origins.<br />
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In contrast, Sega undertook a number of costly experiments with online gaming during the lifespan of their home hardware division, attempting to capitalize upon “digital connectivity between many players (usually in their homes) who remain physically separated and isolated” (Burrill 62), enabling a type of dehumanized competitive sociality in a “clear extension of the arcade” (ibid).<br />
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The experiments included Sega Channel, a cable-tv add-on subscription service which provided about 50 Genesis games a month on a premium-channel pay format, and SegaNet, a 56k multiplayer network created in conjunction with AT&T for the Dreamcast. Both were unsuccessful, possibly because they relied on non-standard uses of technology. Sega Channel required extra hardware and a re-purposing of cable TV infrastructure, while SegaNet, despite Sega of America marketing director Charles Bellfield's claims that “There will be no problems on latency issues” (EGM 193), relied upon 56k phone-line modems to connect players despite the emerging standards of broadband internet among online gamers.<br />
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The Dreamcast hardware, however, lives on in the form of Sega's NAOMI arcade architecture, one of the most long-living arcade systems in history. Sega continues to produce both arcade and home software despite the defunctness of its home hardware division.<br />
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=== Emulation ===<br />
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Because Sega's home hardware systems have all been discontinued, very little software remains in print to accompany them. This presents numerous difficulties to enthusiasts, researchers and historians hoping to play them. The majority of activity concerning discontinued software and hardware for Sega's home systems happens through unofficial homebrew releases and emulators.<br />
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The semidelinquent “antiheros” of video game history, have also developed the skills and tools necessary to be “productive of [themselves]” (Burrill 124), becoming “the code, the coder and the decoder” (ibid). Communities of enthusiasts began producing Dreamcast programs capable of running other home console games and new unofficial software releases before it was even discontinued, and numerous emulation projects that run on home computers existed even earlier.<br />
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In 2006, Sega began offering official emulations of certain 'classic' games through the online Wii Virtual Console-- completing a circuit between arcades, Sega home consoles, masculine enthusiast-tinkerers and the “General Medium” of a broadband-enabled home console.<br />
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== Works Cited ==<br />
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[[Category:Fall 2010]] [[Category:Video Games]]<br />
I include [[internal]] and [http://www.google.com external] links.</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Segacd32x.jpg&diff=11728File:Segacd32x.jpg2010-11-13T21:54:11Z<p>Jah450: Page two of a 32x advertisement</p>
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<div>Page two of a 32x advertisement</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Harrier.jpg&diff=11727File:Harrier.jpg2010-11-13T21:41:31Z<p>Jah450: http://www.jap-sai.com/Games/Space_Harrier/Space_Harrier_Flyer_01.jpg</p>
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<div>http://www.jap-sai.com/Games/Space_Harrier/Space_Harrier_Flyer_01.jpg</div>Jah450http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php?title=File:Segachannel.jpg&diff=11722File:Segachannel.jpg2010-11-13T21:23:12Z<p>Jah450: </p>
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<div></div>Jah450