Digital Hoops History

Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between new media and history by concentrating on the basketball video game, NBA 2K12, and its mediation of historic players and teams. The article employs Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation and its associated notions of immediacy and hypermediacy as part of a textual analysis of the game. By attending to how these processes of immediacy and hypermediacy are expressed through the game text, the essay makes claims about the way the game positions users in relation to history. The argument suggests that NBA 2K12 positions users to perceive history in terms of possibility space rather than stable archive and to potentially perceive simulated history as more interesting than represented history.