Is there a difference in psychology between the local and remote control of objects? The difference between local and remote control parallels the difference between driving inside a car and driving a simulation of a car. The key distinction here is that media are simultaneously local and remote, in that they mediate remote environments/information/objects/people instantaneously into local spaces.

What is perhaps the most critical aspect of vehicular experience? As a question Baudry asks in relation to cinema:

‘do the instruments (the technical base) produce specific ideological effects, and are these effects themselves determined by the dominant ideology?’ (1975: 41)

As intermediation involves multiple interfaces (the interfaces between subject-vehicle and vehicle-environment), the sum of the interfaces allows for a particular amount of transparency, or concealment, of mediation to and from the subject and environment (through the vehicle).

[The] concealment of the technical base will also bring about a specific ideological effect. Its inscription, its manifestation as such, on the other hand, would produce a knowledge effect, as actualization of the work process, as denunciation of ideology and as critique of idealism. (Baudry, 1974-5: 41)

In reality, the kinematic subject’s realised movements are repressed by road laws. In

contrast, experiences of speed through media technologies are currently only limited by the top speed of the system (ie central and graphics processors in computers), and the immersiveness/vividness of the intermediation (size of screen, sound etc). Video games, like other media, are controlled environments insofar as the

danger of spatial-temporal proximity is concerned. Like how the censorship of sex and violence in the media is a way the system of society regulates one’s desires, the buffered distance between subject and environment affords security from injury.