droqen's forum-shaped notebook

[AB]

Why am I reading this book?

bleet (https://bsky.app/profile/droqen.bsky.social/post/3lhp4iboc6c2q)

Quotefrank lantz' The Beauty of Games  has come up a few times for me in context of kill gameplay, im going to read it deeply soon not just because the title posits the opposite position -- but because i suspect lantz is kind of coming from the same place as me, and is trying to find the light.

the real question i have is . . . has he found it to my satisfaction, or does the book come from a place of beautiful denial?  remains to be seen

I heard about this book casually at some point, and was not too sure I needed to read it, but I heard Lantz speak about the book briefly in an episode of Eggplant (I believe it was his first UFO 50 appearance), and in this mention he -- or one of the hosts perhaps -- offhandedly joked that his next book needed to be called [TODO, FIND QUOTE] something like "The ugliness of games" (???). This was the first time I was really interested in reading the book.

Second, a friend recommended it after beginning to watch my kill gameplay rant (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGjv9GDd504) -- and this brought it back on my radar. This friend (hello secret friend) has lots of interesting and good thoughts and cares about my work, and so, this was enough to set me off.

Finally, I did a quick ol' droqen tarot card reading with my unreleased app (which may forever remain unreleased (https://bsky.app/profile/droqen.bsky.social/post/3lhos54gh322t), thanks Apple) asking,
what will I get out of this?

I drew THE SUN. My particular little mini intepretation mentions confidence in the future, along with radiating hope and strength and whatnot (all the usual sun shit) and asks, what unspoken truth has been illuminated by the light? There is a little guy on the ground, ready to fly but not flying, another in the middle in a beam of light, and a third in the middle of the sun (perhaps glowing, perhaps the sun itself, perhaps punching the sun, whatever).

This felt nice. I want to know what happens, and which role I will play. Am I the sun, illuminating -- or am I a recipient of light?

I'm looking forward to finding out.

Oh, that's right. I also read Lantz' substack post about Fractal Block World (https://franklantz.substack.com/p/fractal-block-world), I don't have a 'close reading' thread for this post but my loose response was that his finding beauty in FBW is not a step forward (in terms of my 'kill gameplay'), and is perhaps a key aspect of why I suspect him of what I call 'beautiful denial.'

p7?

"On Thinking Playfully"

This page is from the editors of the book series of which The Beauty of Games is one part.

"video games are such a flourishing medium," they write.

"this is what Playful Thinking [the book series] is all about: new ways of thinking about games and new ways of using games to think about the rest of the world."

i wanted to be cynical about this but i like it, haha. okay, time for the book proper. Lantz' argument.

p9?-10?

Quote. . . how your brain works when you play a game. . . . you internalize the behavior of the game's objects, how they move and interact. . . . Playing a game means learning this language, the game's semiotic system, and then using it to assemble larger ideas and meanings.

It's no surprise to me that this is what Lantz expresses liking, about games! In some  interview somewhere, another thing on the internet that I will not go out of my way to find, he speaks of the hooks that games get in you, the way that you get hooked by a game, and you can be of two minds -- you can be hooked, and you can examine your hooked-self.

That's not really the most relevant thing. I'll speak to the quoted text above, the part pulled out of a larger position on the beauty of Serpentes; learning this language is exactly what I find exhausting, even wasteful, about gameplay, what leads me to kill gameplay... We have a lot of languages! Importantly, we have a lot of real languages, languages that are dying, languages with long and beautiful histories. I'm not opposed to language, as I'm not opposed to desire; (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?msg=4261) but don't we have enough?

If I want the pleasure of learning a language . . and then using it to assemble larger ideas and meanings--well, we have a lot of those already, don't we? This strikes me as an obsession with the medium over the message, and I have a lot of thoughts about that. I understand some people like the medium, I'm familiar with the phrase the medium is the message, it's not what I'm looking for. I want to know what Lantz feels about the message--what makes games beautiful? What makes games beautiful?

Perhaps I misunderstand the title.

Does "The Beauty of Games" refer to what it is that makes games, as a whole, beautiful? Or does it refer to makes one game, as a game, beautiful among games?

p13?

Quote[I love] Serpentes because of its brilliant candy rainbow colors, the chunky electric buzz . . . the slippery feeling of sliding between two instincts and deliberately choosing between them using the power of conscious thought. . . . This game is juicy . . .

For my part, I agree with what Lantz writes -- but I am questioning the instinct. I understand what is delicious about candy, and the sensation does not need to be described to be acknowledged as pleasurable. But what do I get from it, as a person? Not as a player.

But this was only the introduction.

1
Games as an Aesthetic
Form

This chapter is the true structural introduction. In these pages Lantz describes his goals. His hopes. I will come back to check on these, the hopefuls that he expresses. These are the things that he wants the book to do which I want to see how he does:

QuoteI want this book to give people [on the outside] a window into this world and help them understand . . why some people find games deeply beautiful, and why the particular way in which they are beautiful may be historically and culturally important.

I find myself in this position: on the outside, where I have now placed myself. I am not especially out of touch with why people find games deeply beautiful... I'm not an outsider in the sense that I do not understand that. Still, I'm interested in Lantz' argument about the why. Why is it important? Lay it on me.

(Lantz expresses a desire to "provide a theoretical framework" -- I am not interested in this, myself, and I expect I will skip over a lot of this content.)

Quote. . . I want to do what I can to push games themselves in a certain direction. Because to propose an explanation of how games work as culture is to describe a way they could work and suggest a way they should work.

I'm not a fan of the resigned nature of this aspiration. I want to know, what is the 'certain direction' in which Lantz pushes, in which he would choose to push, in which his pushing goes despite not particularly making a claim here or even making a stand as to having any desire. He is resigned to push games in a certain direction. What is that direction? Why is he pushing? I'm intrigued.

QuoteGames matter . . . because we love them, we refuse to live without them, we weave them into our lives and sometimes build our lives around them.

This is a completely insufficient argument for me. If Lantz falls back on this often -- an appeal to obsession as his core argument -- then I might stop reading before I'm done. It's not that I can't recognize the obvious on-the-face importance of things that people themselves choose to make central as part of their lives, that this literally does mean that they matter, but it doesn't get to the heart of my estrangement from the art form.

To recap. Here's what I want to see this book's answers to:

". . . why [do] some people find games deeply beautiful?"

Why is "the particular way in which [games] are beautiful . . .  historically and culturally important"?

Finally, Lantz loosely supposes he will, whether he likes it or not, to some degree "push games themselves in a certain direction. . . . describe a way they could work and suggest a way they should work." What is this 'certain direction'? What is this 'way' (or are these 'ways')?

earlier i wrote, "i suspect lantz is kind of coming from the same place as me, and is trying to find the light. . . . [but] has he found it to my satisfaction, or does the book come from a place of beautiful denial?"

lantz writes, "Games are beautiful, and understanding the particular ways in which they are beautiful is the purpose of this book."

my reading is that he has taken as a precondition that games are beautiful, and this assumption is what raises questions for me. are games beautiful? this is also what i wanted to question in the Playful Thinking introduction. there was a sense that i got that 'why are games beautiful?' was beyond reproach, a question not to be questioned.

what if games are ugly?

p7?

"Why is play both so important and so powerful?"

what if it's not?

p17?

"games are an aesthetic form. Which is to say they are something we do for their own sake" -> i really hate this phrase that keeps coming up in games discourse. "for their own sake" makes no sense at all. lantz follows up...

"they are something we do . . . in search of beauty, pleasure, and meaning" -> great! thank you for saying what you are actually doing the thing for! 'for their own sake' was just noise.

sorry, it's getting late and i'm only 17 pages in. i should chill out, but reading this stuff sets me on fire.

i am an avid reader of things i dislike and disagree with. i am still working out the best way to do that. i have relaxed and am flipping idly now through this book. will anything jump out at me to love, rather than to pick apart? i am looking for that thing that resonates.

p27?

"what looking is to painting, thinking and doing is for games"

im ready to fall asleep, into a deep and beautiful slumber. when we look at a painting... what is that experience of looking? would i make a painting to... hmm... the expressive engine, that is what interests me, and idon't see it in this theorywork.

i am not a painter bt when i produce art i think, what is the feeling of this place? not in words, not crudely. but i adjust and adjust and adjust, paying attention closely to the vibe of the whole. i may touch it, i may not

the act of looking, the act of thinking, of doing, these are the domain of the player, not the artist.

zzzzz

hi good morning! sorry that "zzzzz" reads like an "i am SO bored of this" dismissal, but no i literally went to sleep because it was late and i was tired.

p30?

QuoteGames are not just systems we examine and contemplate; they are systems that we enter into and explore.

Lantz quotes Donella Meadows (author of Systems: A Primer, which is a book i love) as part of his argument that games represent systems and yes, this I agree with, I love systems and systems thinking. Games do not didactically "teach" systems thinking, but perhaps provoke it, by presenting players with systems that they want to know more about, and enabling them to play around with those systems in ways that facilitate such 'finding out'.

And yet, this does not require games' goals, their compulsions. We can very much design tools for exploring simulations of those inherently interesting systems which we have reason to want to understand. Games go a step further, creating incentives, "creating desire".
 

p32?

QuoteAll games, regardless of whether they utilize computers, have an essential relationship to computation.

Too focused on one type of game, here. Limiting, narrowing. Let's go with it, we're talking about "games like chess", games which do this thing with numbers. Not the only thing games do.

p33?

Quote. . . higher-level confusion is the beauty of Chess, and you don't get there without first letting go of the lower-level confusion about the position of the physical piece on the squares of the board.

Lantz attempts to defuse a potential argument against the evils of Chess' abstraction, but misses the mark for me... here is his identification of the position he attempts to satisfy:

p32?

Quote"Aha!" I hear some of you say, "this is precisely it! This is everything wrong with games, this desire to boil away the warm and wonderful ambiguity of the analog world and turn it into the steam of systems! . . "

Hmm.

This "boiling away" is not something that sounds good, to me, but it is the essential nature of capturing anything. My beef is, WHY has the boiling been done? We aren't putting a pot of water on the stovetop -- we've taken a thing and with precision removed what is not important, enhancing what is.

What is "the warm and wonderful ambiguity of the analog world" which this speaking character is so sad to see go?

Well, we don't know, and that's okay. He acknowledges that "Perhaps this is everything wrong with games", understanding at least that boiling has consequences. What do we get for our trouble?

p34?

Quote. . . a fascination with actions and numbers--with the relationship between the fuzzy, ambiguous objects and forces of the continuous world and the abstract logical systems of ideas, numbers, and rules we use to predict and understand it.

p34?

QuoteEven if our goal is to develop a critical aesthetics, a progressive aesthetics that is deeply dissatisfied with the status quo and wants to push onward to discover games' greatest potential, this project needs to be grounded in an understanding of game experiences as they actually are.

Aha! Yes! The book is coming for me.

I am looking forward to this section. Let me say first that I am happy to be killing gameplay. I have tried to get at what it is that i want from inside games and IT HAS NOT SATISFIED ME. My goal is no longer to "discover games' greatest potential." How limiting that would be. How limiting that was, and is! I want to discover my own greatest potential. Games are a tool with which I am familiar, and I will always be touched by them.

I don't think adhering to games is good or healthy. Use them. Use them.

Lantz self-reflects on the feelings games give him that he likes, which is a beautiful bit of openness. I will rip these apart, but before I do, understand that I am mainly ripping myself apart. Of course I relate. How could I not? I'm human too. I'm a lover of games too.

QuoteComfort . . . a trickle of novelty regulated by repetition . . . a tame parade of known unknowns

QuoteChemicals . . . to experience these mental states but to enjoy the power of being able to turn them on and off at will

QuoteEgo . . . theatrical rituals of will in which my capacity to solve problems and pursue goals is put on a pedestal, a self-portrait of the choices and actions that define me as a human in this world.

This is bad! On top of overly prizing problem-solving capacity, and not only that but capacity in a false context, we have the boiled-away nature of game systems that we just touched on! I'm not even editing things out of context. You are not, cannot, be defined by these choices and actions in a context with everything "warm and wonderful" boiled away.  Sudoku does not make you smarter, it just makes you better at Sudoku.

QuoteCompanionship . . . elaborate excuses to spend time with other people. . . to speak and be heard. . .

Maybe I'm just an introvert. I used to like this, but I'd rather go and see a play with my friends, or go to a little house party and pay attention to each other without the need for an intermediary.

If you are having trouble making time to spend with other people, or to speak and be heard, or various other things said here not quoted, there are good ways to resolve this problem. The game does not solve the problem! It takes the attention in the room. Do something because you want to do the thing damn it!

QuoteBoredom . . . Sometimes a game is a device that accelerates time, transporting me to the far side of an empty stretch of my life.

noooooooooooooooo

As I said, this is a very nice an open list. When I attack the items in this list I am attacking myself, not Frank, not gamers, not anyone else.

I have played games to pass by "an empty stretch of my life". This speaks to their ability to consume time, it's a completely vapid value except perhaps convenience? But we can do better. Knit on the subway! Read a fucking book! Draw tarot cards. Do a meaningful activity. Are games meaningful or just convenient and captivating?

I have gone to play games as "elaborate excuses" to be social, and -- I won't go off on a huge tangent here. But basically I don't like it, except when the game is explicitly a social game designed to play with our desire to be social. But I hate being at odds with the real reason I'm attending something!

I won't talk more about ego, except to say that ego ought to be killed rather than satisfied.

Quote. . . one result of this exercise of honest self-reflection might be to admit that these primal pleasures are important and valuable to us.

important and valuable pleasures - comfort, experiencing altered brain chemical states, having ego satisfied (feeling competent), having companionship, not being bored

i would like to feel genuinely competent. sometimes a game will do this for me!

sometimes i am bored. various things will do, to satisfy my boredom.

usually i don't much pursue altered brain chemical states, they happen when they happen and i enjoy such acceptance of real moments in my life.

boredom... i actually would enjoy more silence of boredom in my life. but having the tools available to express things out of such silence is key.

companionship, comfort... i have these things and they do not hinge on playing games, i don't relate at all... i would not, however, deny others such a source

I have begun to skim. I don't think the book is for me - a thing arguing for the beauty of games, no surprise that I would be resisting it, but it's nice to feel so certain. I just don't see the value.

In the second chapter Lantz discusses poker and its connection to money. Money is of course just a game too, a big vessel of gameplay that we cannot opt out of. So the connection is not surprising at all.

kill gameplay

I love this funny joke on p77? where Lantz referentially and apologetically describes his action as ranging in columns. Good poem, too.

But yes I do feel unaccountably tired and sick, now that we're at the next columns. I would rather be rising and gliding out, looking up in perfect silence.

Lantz describes games' "style problem", a result of been an art form mainly occupied by people who are very rational, who tend to think in these rigid terms, and it's an interesting bit. I'm in full skim mode at last, so I won't pick it apart, I will just say... i agree, but i don't think it's the right way to be? I'm steadily gliding away from that side of things and i no longer relate to the analytical approach to the world. At all! and i want others too to be set free.

Philip Zimbardo

the books ends painting a picture of "scientists" and "poets" perspectives coming together. these two paths, taken together. i do not feel at all satisfied!

i would like to live in the world.