After reading Chapter 1 of The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich, I found the third of the five principles of new media outstanding. As Manovich said, all five principles depend on each other but are arranged logically. From numerical representation to modularity, automation made me understand how games are made, “Almost every commercial game included a component called an “AI engine,” which stands for the part of the game’s computer code that controls its characters–car drivers in a car race simulation, enemy forces in a strategy game such as Command and Conquer, single attackers in first-person shooters such as Quake ” (Manovich, 33). As a gamer, I’ve always wondered how someone can program all the movements a character can make, from attacking to even walking. All it takes is codes that we make for an AI engine, and it will have the characters do human functionalities. Aside from gaming functionalities, we use automation to automate searches that we put, “ Finally, in what may be the most familiar experience of automated media generation, many web sites automatically generate Web pages on the fly when the user reaches the site. They assemble the information from databases and format it using generic templates and scripts,” (Manovich, 32). Automation comes from the first two principles of new media, numerical representation and modularity and without them, automation to even AI engines would not be here. I personally never knew how much coding, maths, quantitative work there is to have a photograph, films and cinema to come out the way they are. However, I do find it interesting how with the five principles that is how new media came to be.
