Googling about HDTV I came across this post on Douglas Rushkoff's blog (about a year old):
McLuhan considered TV a "cool" medium, in that it required the participation of the audience to resolve those blurry black and white pixels into a real image. While film and radio enjoyed higher fidelitiy, and constituted hot media, TV was cool - and invited the cynicism and objectivity of distance.
HDTV is anything but cool, in that sense. ...
While it's true that HDTV is a high resolution, high information medium, I suspect that the growth of this "hot" medium is due to the expansion of gaming, and is driven by the "cool" participatory nature of games. In HDTV the game medium collides with TV. Both are particatory media, but in different ways. When watching TV we piece together blurry lo-resolution fragments of information to create an image. When playing games we take actions in an environment that is deliberately "incomplete". Through our participation we explore that environment and develop proficiency in the challenges the game provides.
In gaming there's a demand for higher resolution images, and games are often sold on just the eye candy appeal. Though eye candy alone can't make a good game, it's a given that Pc and console games are increasingly hi-resolution. So does this make games a "hot" medium? No, not if you take into account that games heavily involve haptics. To play a game you move through a virtual environment using a small set of buttons, a joystick, a keyboard or mouse. Once my son did an especially acrobatic maneuver while playing spider man and when I asked him how he did it he said "Oh that's just B A A B". Both my sons communicate in these cryptic game controller button sequences "now do a Y A and right trigger". I'm old school. Flight Simulator gives me motion sickness and when I get ambushed in Halo 2 I often fall over backwards. I can't help myself. My body is practically hardwired into the game space. And though I am a fossil, I'm sure that this is a general human trait. My sons may not be so spastic as I am, but they must be experiencing some sort of haptic connection with the virtual space of the game, and that physical connection is being communicated through their thumbs and a very low-resolution set of buttons.
For this sort of haptic connection to be meaningful, the game must provide a rich set of visual queues to indicate where the player is in the virtual space, and what is their physical relationship to the objects in that environment. To convey that amount of information you need hi-res visuals. There's no point in navigating dextrously through a room full of obstacles if those obstactles are all just pink rectangular blocks stamped out in 8 bit color. Subtle physical interaction requires subtle rendering. Consider two game titles that have pushed up the visual resolution of PC games: Myst and Flight Simulator. Both are highly participatory games and have very open gameplay. Flight Simulator may not be strictly a game, but makes the point that a visually compelling environment creates the possibility for open-ended exploration. That exploration becomes meaningful largely because the player has the vicarious experience of actually exploring a compellingly "real" environment. They are able to participate in that environment in many ways, often in ways that were not forseen by the creators of the game.
It's true that TV will be challenged and changed by the "hot" hi-res visuals of HDTV. In the long run though, both forms are radically altered by the addition of another participatory technology: the game controller.
