agency SUCKS… or does it???
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dont forget abotut the part where she sits on your face for having those acceptable views that is very important in a crpg for many people
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Stated at this level of generality it’s kind of like complaining that all life is just physics. You push things and they move, that’s all you ever do, your consciousness interpreting these motions as anything more than motions is itself a byproduct of things moving in your brain. Actually “you” don’t push anything, there is no you, the bits of meat that you can sense are themselves all pushed in a million ways you can’t detect, so in the end all you’re doing is using your consciousness to fool yourself that there is a you you can detect and pilot and alter - waving at yourself in the mirror…
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cuba on that sheng-ji yang shit
(this is also a videogame thing i think about a lot)
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I still need to read Nguyen. I’ve heard him expounding on the theory on some podcast and it sounded alright but I’m always a little suspicious of people trying to boil down a pluriform thing like games to one privileged concept to sell a book or whatever. I don’t think this is what Nguyen is doing exactly it’s just my hackles are bracing. I like thinking about ‘games’ as the category of literally all games humanity has ever played in all contexts and I find most models can’t accommodate this breadth so we have to talk about little subdivisions of humanity like sports or videogames or penny arcades or whatever. I still need to read Nguyen.
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I think this definitely continues to be the case. A lot of people treat the discussion like it’s some Rubik’s cube to be solved and some academics in particular seem very impatient to be the one who declares them a ‘solved’ area of study or something
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for every expert declaring “Video Games are Games played on a Video Screen; with the following list of excluded properties that prevent considering anything interesting: caveat 1; caveat 2; …” or “Video games are the only medium where you can feel what it’s like to be imprisoned in a puzzle dungeon of fiendish traps & impossible choices”,
I wish there was “A study of the most rage-inducing game mechanisms, we ran a multi-year trial and got 35% of participants to break the controller/smash the screen” or “The B button is an affront to God, my manifesto explains all (with citations)”
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Crawford said something about game designers being really sensitive about the sordid reputation games have as a medium. probably the most insightful thing he’s said. i think that extends outward into this need to psuedoscientify game design as a serious discipline that reflects something about the nature of the universe. it makes game design as a discipline feel more rigorous and scientific and less like utterly arbitrary decisions made by the whims of whomever. Jon Blow was really into this whole idea of games as some elemental function of the universe. i think having this sort of approach does have the benefit of making it easier to define what you think is ‘ethical’ and what is ‘unethical’ design.
so like it’s not like there’s nothing there - that’s where the attempts by game academics in the 00’s to formalize game studies and turn looking at videogames into a continuation of analog game studies come out of. in addition to it making it easier to define a form of what you think is good or bad for games to embody, games have to be defined by their uniqueness vs. other media as a way to justify their existence as a unique form of media to the old gatekeepers. so it probably was a necessary evolution when talking about allowing games studies as a concept to even exist as any kind of idea.
but ofc it quickly hardened into half-considered ‘hard and fast’ rules that have created a huge host of other problems. it’s this sort of formalist hammer that gets used to beat down any dissent or differing perspective with ‘facts and logic’. the sort of psuedosciency approach to game design has also infiltrated other media too and helped large platforms put the clamp down on anything that is too challenging or confrontational. it’s also led to the sort of reactionary “facts don’t care about your feelings” stances to become entrenched in the industry i.e. Black Myth: Wukong developers naming themselves Game Science and treating their entire creative process as a science. this all feeds on the extreme into the fascist AI guy beliefs about art being ultimately something you can reduce to a formula and that being its ideal function.
as far as games having trouble “meaning something” - ‘meaning’ is obviously a difficult concept to pin down. at some level meaning is constructed, and a result that materializes out of the subjective experience you have with something. but ‘meaning’ is obviously more than that too - it has to be aspired to and struggled for. you can’t just make a frictionless thing that doesn’t challenge people and act like that’s equally valid. then it ends up getting into the sort of “no ethical consumption under capitalism” thought terminating cliche of art. some of the sort of poptimist arguments have gotten into that territory in deeply irritating ways. it’s another justification for never having to grow or change or ask for more.
but anyway, it felt like people 15 years ago were at least trying to grapple with this concept of ‘meaning’ a little more, and what games could or should do to reach it. i think there was an acceptance that games weren’t doing enough, and needed to do better. but then eventually that debate got too complicated for people to maintain and people were getting harassed en masse by the gamer hordes. so it was treated it as sort of “resolved” issue without it really ever going anywhere and it doesn’t really get talked about anymore.
in the piece i wrote about the doom wad A.L.T. several years back i begun it by talking about the perpetual struggle of games to really ‘mean’ something. games have been so pushed along as a popular medium by technological shifts from the beginning that a lot of these larger questions are still very unresolved. because the state of the medium keeps changing so fast, the perpetual momentum makes it unable to focus on a larger debates about the form for very long. in the case of A.L.T. i think it means a lot to me because it’s such a subversion of expectations in so many ways, and an injection of a lot of existential ideas into a very unexpected place. what if Doomguy had to grapple with his place in historical trauma? what if Mario was forced to grapple with the cosmic meaninglessness of the universe? stuff like B3313 at least gets closer to approaching that idea, but feels like it’s a much more childish version in a lot of ways.
but it’s also easier for meaning to feel more elusive in an era when it just doesn’t feel like people really value artistic expression very much in general. when you have the time to engage with something and put some trust in it, it’s easier to find the meaning there. but there’s a huge lack of trust. so i think it’s a double-edged sword: meaning can be a failure of the art itself, which is also a reflection of people’s unwillingness to engage and accept what is around them at a given time. those two things feed each other. i think it’s why Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Showgirls were largely considered bad movies in the 90’s and largely considered the opposite now. there was something going on at the time that prevented a lot of people from recognizing what was actually happening in them. eventually they’re sort of ‘disciplined’ and things correct to the mean. and it takes people getting tired of that status quo to go back and see what was missed and thrown under the bus. i think we’re in that sort of reality right now for a lot of stuff, but maybe in a much more foundational and scary way.
really i think we at least have to feel more like we’re occupying some sort of consensus reality where what we do actually means something and will be received by someone and things are directly tied to other things for the larger debates to really take hold. it feels too much like people are just on their own islands reinventing the same concepts over and over again right now to me. maybe we just have to invent our own consensus reality at this point tbh lol and move forward. because i think the debates on stuff like “meaning” are unresolved and should be pushed further. and even in our era of like endless ‘creepypasta’ and ‘lore’ clearly a lot of it still feels kind of puerile and there’s a level artistically that a lot of things are still really failing to reach. and the AAA game method of just imitating Hollywood and riding off its clout has clearly failed to reach it too.
there’s a lot of space to push games stuff further artistically too - but the revolution won’t be televised, lol. it won’t be reflected by big youtubers like some of this stuff that hints at deeper commentary but never fully gets there does.
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that’s good. perception is cool.
i think we can reduce any human activity in this way. i don’t think it’s a very fruitful avenue. unlike the bountiful halls of bubble bobble.
there are many different sorts of video games. some of them have physics. some of them have grids. some of them don’t have pictures at all! : - O
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moving a physics object in a video game is not like moving a doll at all because it’s like moving a radio controlled car. possibly it’s also like driving an actual car? i’ve never done it. it’s also like playing a musical instrument. you control a thing through a fixed, coherent interface which makes you able to anticipate that if you move your hand in this way, the thing you control will move in that way, which makes you embody the thing, which is a bit like picking up a new body map. picking up a new body map is a very pleasing thing to do. anyway these kinds of video games are cybernetics. cybernetics are cool.
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also i read this post recently and had been thinking about it and it made me think of what you’re saying here
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Yes. The embodied pleasures of games produced either from a friction with the controls and goals or from a direct-seeming control over the controls and goals is not something that, usually, maybe ever, spreadsheets and page browsing ever produces. And this is something I feel Nguyen’s ideas really give credence to, and some of the conversation above is missing or devaluing.
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I think a weakness of this argument — and I’m not trying to dismiss it, I like that the argument is being made — is that, in terms of the late 00’s specifically, it’s very “heighten the contradictions”-coded, insofar as mainstream games design had gotten really bad in many respects by then (see recent discussions of Jade Empire and Okami) which obviously created the conditions under which people were willing to deconstruct the medium to this extent… like, saying that Dark Souls was responsible for a retreat toward kitsch is not unalike saying that FDR ruined the conditions for fascism or communism to take hold… in one light it is true but I think the main problem with this observation is that the set of highly engaged people who were/are more were excited to work within the collapse are just as uninterested in what precipitated it as the people whose salaries were dependent on the old order are willing to criticize it. consequently neither group (crust punk proxy or tech worker proxy) is particularly interested in framing the mid 2000s as uniquely bad, which can be misleading as to which era is actually being considered aberrant and for what reasons, generational bias aside.
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i find satisfaction in controlling an actual car even though it brings me a lot of anxiety cuz its dangerous. i agree with the analogy to game playing & why that has inherent interest for me at least. its a safe car
i also have (again my personal, ymmv) a lot of interest in controlling/embodying a being that is not me. especially one whose destiny i have control over. its a bit projection i admit
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Honestly my main problem is that I just don’t see the point of this sort of discussion if we keep conflating a sort of undefined idea of the industry with the form’s potential and usage at the margins. I suppose I can understand the frustration, if that is what it is, but to me it just feels like submitting to the same consumerist ideology. There are possibilities in interactive art. It’s nice.
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The way I see it is the player character has lines they read and a part to play defined by the author, but there’s improvisation with physical movements and some ad libbing defined by the player. So basically: pro wrestling promos (art) vs pro wrestling matches (also art)
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is interaction good or not? i’m currently debating whether I should make portions of my game where you walk around a town or whether I should abstract these to be menus, because one of them is greatly more expensive than the other to make.
I find an awful lot of contemporary thought on game design, mostly inside the industry, to be really shallow. I think the fact that Game Maker’s Toolkit basically became the #1 source of game design thought on youtube despite not making a game for many years is evidence for how shallow the current level of thinking is.
Mostly when I’m making games and I don’t have to worry about implementation, and just the creation of spaces, dialog, and “content” I’m allowed to dream for once and play as an act of creation. I have a tiny little GB studio game I sometimes poke at, and the nice thing about GB studio is that you can only make top down adventure games, side scrolling platformers, rudimentary shoot em ups, or point and click adventures. and that’s it! I don’t have to worry about re-inventing the wheel when it comes to platformers, you can just be a little guy who hops around a dungeon. once you start having to add stuff like “inventory” and interaction systems where you go up to a thing, press a button, and then things happen - that’s when it gets greatly complicated and the potential for bugs appear.
I think about this David Lynch video where he’s really angry that they have less time at a set that he wants, and he yells “We won’t have time to dream!” and I think about that a lot with games. We don’t dream.
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personally, i prefer embodying beings that are me. you should give it a try sometime :3c
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