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Short abstract:

I take two forms of scaling in video games - the zoom and the level - as instructive examples of a scalar antinomy that conditions computational culture. Experiments with scale itself through and beyond this antinomy - in both theory and games - offer insights into the primacy of scale to mediation

Long abstract:

This paper takes two forms of scaling in video games - the zoom and the level - as instances of a scalar order that holds across computational cultures today. This order is a productive, symbiotic impasse between discrete and continuous modes of mediation, which I argue should be grasped as an antinomy of scale.

Video games offer useful examples with which to think through this antinomy as a mediatic order. Interfacial zooms — the smooth panning in, out, and across associated with RTS games, the camera flows and dynamic movement of first and third-person combat games, and the increasingly prevalent function of 'dropping' from a higher map to a more granular environment — are a 'smooth-scaling' that orders differences into a consistent spatio-temporal schema that can be traversed without transformation. On the other side of the antinomy, levels are perhaps the most widely recognized and influential units of organisation in video games: they structure the ascending hierarchies of difficulty of classic arcade games, individuate separate game environments, and form the basis of the RPG ranking and progression systems that now pervade games of numerous genres.

Approaching zooms and levels as (1) essentially scalar techniques, and (2) examples of a mutually imbricated antinomy that must be resolved, offers insights into how scale is ordered more generally in contemporary technocultures. I contend that taking seriously scale’s primacy to mediation offers ways to think beyond the antinomy of scale indexed by levels and zooms, opening up more 'transsystematic' orders of media.