When talking about interaction, it is sometimes difficult to avoid its opposite at the narrative level: immersion. However, you will find that interaction and immersion can be put into the glass jar of time, thus becoming the obscure commoditized object of the new media era. The commodity attribute of time can be simply reduced to being obscured: people watch movies, play games, ostensibly buy cinema services and game programs, but what they really consume or enjoy is this period of time watching movies or playing games. The emergence of webcast does not completely remove the cover; on the contrary, the storability of live streaming immediately gives it a new coat-data. 

 

Obviously, no one can intercept a period of "blank" time and put it on the shelf like selling bottled fresh air. As a rigid dimension, time is attached to anything that can be attached. Data is no exception. It takes time for us to get the data, and it takes more time for us to use / enjoy the data. To some extent, the advent of the digital age makes time more widely crystallized on data. Therefore, in the current massive consumption of data traffic, the element of time is gradually emerging. Attention economy or experience economy, they are trying to seize nothing more than consumers' time-first letting you enjoy a certain amount of time in a "free" way, and then tempting you to buy and spend another time. In fact, this is the future that the current business big data vaguely points to.

 

Interestingly, in the digital age, replaying an old game may be much more difficult than watching a movie. The reason is that the current computer system has been upgraded to the point where it is impossible to run nostalgic games. Although there are solutions such as simulators at the practical level, the disconnection between games and computer operating systems fundamentally touches on a question related to "big data": for those data born in digital format, how should it be stored and archived to ensure its tunability so that it can really become data? 

 

Once we regard the movies we have seen and the games we have played as geography in the course of life, we have to face the fact that those geography as games, those that exist in digital format are the most difficult to reproduce and repeat. When we try to touch the topic of "geographical narrative in the digital age", we will encounter the dual dilemma of "the geography of the digital age" and "the narration of the digital age": how to define the geography of the digital age? How does this geography combine with the narrative of the digital age? 

 

I try to outline the game after the RPG era as the dual carrier of digital geography and digital narrative-the game itself is not only a potential digital geography, but also a typical model of digital narrative. But if we go back to the definition of digital geography, we still need to deal with or face the vastness of the digital world / cyberspace: does every game written, every node in cyberspace constitute the geography of the digital age? Personally, the answer is no. I prefer to judge whether the "data" constitutes the geography of the digital age by its accessibility / adjustability and the interactive history of the "data"-for the post-00s generation, the street of Chun-Li fighting on the computer simulator is the uninhabited unknown geography of the digital age. In other words, "interaction + time" has actually become the core standard for judging geography in the digital age.

 

It is deeply surprising that the film, a slightly old medium, is particularly competent for the visual presentation of digital narrative-in the movie "Nerve", we clearly see how ancient games are crazily reborn with the help of mobile Internet technology, and the real geography of the old era and the virtual geography of the digital age are also perfectly nested in the film, so that I have to predict: in the digital age, The new and old geography and the new and old narration will mirror each other and nest each other. In this kind of mapping overlap, human subjectivity will encounter great challenges, and examining subjectivity by examining the interaction I participate in may be the only way I can think of at present. 

 

"The new and old geography and the new and old narratives will mirror each other and nest each other." Why does it challenge the status of human subjectivity? First of all, there is no inevitable relationship between new and old geography and whether people are subject or not. people can look for their own experiences and traces of time in various geographical environments, as long as you can find or create a new unknown field. getting your own unprecedented experience, whether in the data age or in the past, does not prevent people from becoming the subject, because the subject and object itself is defined by the person.