QuotePlaying a video game involves a kind of Faustian bargain with the technology, a handing-over of real-world agency in exchange for agency within the gameworld.

My question here is, "Is it worth it?" I find that my answer is increasingly "No," but I do want to ponder (in a grammatically simplified bullet point form) the possible gains offered by the bargain, the reasons that Shinkle identifies a player might agree to such a bargain.

QuoteWhat the game offers:
- a different reality (one of spectacular scenography)
- enhanced abilities
- more or less eternal life

QuoteWhat the game is doing in order to keep its end of the bargain:
- supporting a perceptually coherent gameworld
- 'humanises' the technology
- acting as an extension of the body
- enabling the technology to function as an affirmation of reason
- sustains a subjectivity that is 'posthuman' (in Hayles's sense of the term: [the] subject[..] is seamlessly articulated with an intelligent machine)

QuoteCan stuplimity or states of flow be properly described as sublime affects? Flow states challenge subjective boundaries by encouraging a dissolution of self.

This paragraph begins by asking a question and basically answering "no", then asks a different question - where else can the sublime be felt in technology?

QuoteIf we are to understand sublime affect in the ecological terms outlined earlier, then we need to look for it somewhere else – at those points in gameplay where the player becomes aware of the technology that lies beneath the game form, and where the consequences of this encounter present a challenge to the self.

I particularly like the phrase "a challenge to the self"

We move into flow from stuplimity, in contrast.

QuoteFlow describes a state of total physical and psychic immersion in a task.

QuoteA flow state [..] is one of control.

the discursive meaning is ... okay, i just need to check out the source material to understand what's going on here, and oh my god it's 426 pages long and only available for reference. well, here it is . . . The Ideology of the Aesthetic

i don't understand these quotes, time to break them down:

Quote from: 24reifying of the signifier

reifying: the act of treating something abstract, such as an idea, relation, system, quality, etc., as if it were a concrete object
signifier: a symbol, sound, or image (such as a word) that represents an underlying concept or meaning

i think i understand "reifying of the signifier" and how it relates to video games. a later sentence in the essay is "In the video game, technology is used superficially – not to control nature, but to simulate it." and i relate to this as well, the reification of the signifier is where we simulate not nature, but the signifiers of nature... an artifact which seems to want to recreate the beauty of nature, rather than increase the viewer's admiration of it.

Quote from: 24displacement of discursive meaning with random intensities

discursive: "digressing from subject to subject," "relating to discourse or modes of discourse."

yeah i don't really get this one. 'discursive meaning.'

okay, the word 'discursive' on the online merriam-webster contains two literally opposing meanings, which sucks:

Definition of discursive
1a: moving from topic to topic without order : RAMBLING
//gave a discursive lecture
//discursive prose
b: proceeding coherently from topic to topic

ah but here is a better one

discursive (philosophy): marked by a method of resolving complex expressions into simpler or more basic ones : marked by analytical reasoning

QuoteIf gameplay is indeed an instantiation of stuplime sensation, this suggests that we situate video games in the context of the general waning of affect that is said to characterise postmodern experience: a cultural moment where depth is replaced by surface and real affects by simulated ones. [24]

Quote from: 24Fredric Jameson argues that the ethos of work, suffering, and transformation that typified nineteenth-century sensibilities has been replaced, in the postmodern imagination, by play, idleness, and indifference. Terry Eagleton frames the difference between modernist and postmodernist aesthetics in a similar way: 'In the post-war years a different form of aestheticization was also to saturate the entire culture of late capital, with its fetishism of style and surface, its cult of hedonism and technique, its reifying of the signifier and displacement of discursive meaning with random intensities.' (Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, London 1990, p.373).

Do I believe that gameplay is an instantiation of stuplime sensation?

Do I agree with Fredric Jameson's argument about postmodern "play, idleness, and indifference"?

QuoteStuplime affect makes no claims for spiritual transcendence or ironic distance, relying instead on a paralytic tedium: 'Instead of emerging from existential or phenomenological questions ... this boredom resides in relentless attention to the infinite and small'.

I can't tell how I feel about this section, in particular 'relentless attention to the infinite and small' seems intriguing to me, not necessarily something to be regretted or criticized on its face. But in context the essay appears to be making this claim critical of the stuplime affect.

Quote[..rather than in classical formations of the sublime,] in stuplime experience, the initial dysphoric affect is not overcome by a competing one affirming the self's superiority, or concluded in a euphoric dissolution of self. Instead, stuplimity draws together boredom and astonishment, it fuses awe to its opposite and holds these opposing affects in tension – an indefinite state without resolution.

I feel some of this. If you play certain of my playables or oubliettes, in particular those without endings, they exist within this "indefinite state without resolution".

But I can't tease out the meaning of the first part. It seems "the initial dysphoric affect" is referring to something that the sublime and stuplime have in common, and then the claim presumes that the sublime overcomes this by either "affirming the self's superiority" or "in a euphoric dissolution of self."

Oh, writing it out piece by piece helped me think about it. The sublime puts the self in some form of existential crisis (the dysphoric affect), and that crisis must be resolved by either "affirming" the self's existence or allowing its existence to be destroyed (in "dissolution"). By contrast, the stuplime puts the self in some form of existential crisis, and that crisis is fused with boredom, an action which (for some reason) causes the crisis to be held "in tension", "without resolution."

What is it that the sublime does differently from the stuplime that causes the crisis to be resolved, or rather, "overcome"?

This entire section, "Gameplay: stuplimity or flow?", is really hitting me hard! It's saying a lot of the things I have been thinking and talking about.

QuoteIf the interface works properly[..] the game form itself [and "The extensive gameworlds, dazzling graphics, and sophisticated gameplay"] is rarely available to the player in its entirety. Instead, it is encountered as a series of finite elements, experienced as 'extended cycles of exhaustion and recovery', as tasks are repeated over and over again in order to progress. Rather than a confrontation with the infinite, experience of the game form involves an extended and, at times, deeply tedious engagement with 'the mechanical operations of a finite system'.

[..]stuplimity [the experience of aesthetic awe intertwined with boredom] 'reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as a totality, as does Kant's mathematical sublime, yet not through an encounter with the infinite but with finite bits and scraps of material in repetition.'

Compare to my tweet quoted below:

Quote from: @droqeni want to experience a game like i experience a painting, all at once. gameplay doesn't have to exist in four dimensions. trapped behind walls, behind time, behind gates, behind locked doors. gameplay could be free

QuoteIn its classical form, sublime experience is found only in nature and not in human conceits.
[..] both natural and man-made objects became part of the discourse of Manifest Destiny.
[..] Where the European Enlightenment regarded nature as something to be admired from a distance, early American settlers saw it as an obstacle to be overcome, and public works like dams, canals, and railway bridges, which demonstrated humanity's control over natural forces, were powerful sources of sublime sensation. By the mid nineteenth century, natural splendour and technological accomplishment were firmly linked to each other, and to the ideology of republicanism, as individual experience of immensity and awe was transformed into a belief in national greatness.

My super-rough paraphrasing of moochi's attempt to paraphrase our exploration, haha: "A very short experience that is trying to encompass everything, doing everything you can do in the smallest package possible, where everything is chosen to suit the situation(?)"

Quote from: moochi, 2:08:00-ishI don't know that much :D [..] this idea of making a very short experience that is [..] entirely, very, trying to evoke a particular vibe, but trying to be very [..] encompassing everything? [..] the thing you were saying about the presentation is very important, you're trying to use everything you can in the smaller, the smallest package possible, but like, the more you can do with the smallest package possible [..] Every word you choose, chosen very.. Every thing you put in the game is chosen very.. [something situation? with a lot the situation?]. That's my interpretation of it, I don't remember what they wrote about.

AH, here it is, the stuff that followed this was Danny asking Mut to elaborate on haiku games! I might write a letterclub about this? It's really interesting to see what it looks like from the outside...

Quote from: hawkdanny, 2:01:30-ishI was posting in paradise recently about Beautycopter because there was this conversation happening about asset flip aesthetics[..] What works and what doesn't, what is valuable. And I was posting about how Beautycopter is a really incredible presentation of a very, of a mostly, uninteresting game design, to me, of fetch quests. [Awake] is not an uninteresting game design, but it is, I think very importantly, equal parts presentation. It's interesting thinking about[..]

Quote from: hawkdanny, 2:03:05-ish[..] I think it is interesting thinking about presentation and aesthetics as part of games, presentation as separate from gamefeel, or juice. It is... interesting to me. I don't have more thoughts on that right now, but this game is making me think about how important the presentation is. And at least, it's doing some stuff with the aesthetics that fold back into the mechanics, like your steps are now important to be able to count them, and the way the audio sounds...