Thoughts on 'structural incoherence'

I thought that for my second blog post I would write about something that has interested me in the course so far. A concept that was mentioned in lectures and in my tutorial was ‘structural incoherence’. Being a film student, I immediately think of how this concept from gaming relates to concepts in film studies.

(We also discussed in tutorial gaming literacy and immersion and how these two things relate back to structural incoherence too.)

My basic understanding is that structural incoherence occurs when a video games draws attention to itself as a constructed medium – whether it be through a glitch, through the presence of an invisible barrier or lack of continuity within the game. From that definition we can relate structural incoherence to hypermediacy because it is a way in which video games draw attention to themselves at a mediated experience. The two aren’t the same, however, and this is where gaming literacy comes in.

Some people may point to things such as on-screen health bars/ammunition bars and maps as examples of ‘hypermediacy’ but in reality most game players view these things as a necessary and natural part of the gaming environment. The playing of games teaches us to accept and then ignore certain aspects of the medium just as the watching of films teaches us to ignore things such as film editing and cuts. Structural incoherence or hypermediacy are thus more likely to crop up when rules of gaming literacy are violated.

When thinking about video games and films I find it easy to distinguish them by considering the amount of structural incoherence each medium offers. It is not often in films – unless they are experimental films – that continuity is broken. Films are a highly coherent medium and that’s what they rely upon. If films draw attention to themselves, immersion is often broken. Being closed texts they are also less open to structural incoherence.

The inherent difference with video games is the amount of agency a player has within the space of the game. Being a more open text, video games become susceptible to explorations of the world of the game and in the process limits/structural incoherencies can be discovered by players. But coming across and impassable chain-link fence need not ruin the immersive experience of video games. The reading from Taylor talks about the two levels of immersion in video games. The first level – diegetic immersion – is on the same level as the immersion found in films and literature. It is the immersive experience of being ‘lost’ within a text, ignoring the process of mediation. Once attention is drawn to this mediation, the immersive experience is ruined. However, for video games there is a second level to the immersive experience which need not let immersion be broken by a loss of diegetic immersion. The second level – situated immersion – combines elements of gaming literacy with agency to create a type of immersion unique to the gaming world. For example, even if a player discovers and impassable chain-link fence and diegetic immersion is broken, situated immersion may remain in play because gaming literacy has taught the player to expect such a limitation and to overlook it.

Those were the thoughts I had on video games/films. There’s a lot more to say but I will save it for other blog posts.

Craig Robertson