Quote[..]the process of ludic engagement can be framed as a drive towards mastery — defined, more specifically, as the capacity to frame a complete understanding of the game system[..]

My favourite work (of my own) to revisit emerses me out of the work itself and into-- most often-- my own memories of a real thing. In some respect there is therefore a "complete understanding" of the art to be achieved: the sort pursued by Pierre Menard. But that level of appreciation is separate from the self-serving 'mastery' acquired through the course of playing a videogame. When I wrote seek what they tried to seek I have to wonder at the dual roles at play in a video game or in any game.

As a player am I seeking what the artist sought, or what my fellow players sought?

Can they ever be the same?

Are they always the same?

What constitutes a "complete understanding" of a work of art? In the case of a painting is it the complete contents of its paints and their positioning on the canvas, or is it where the artist purchased those paints and how they applied the paints to the canvas, or is it what the artist had in mind and why they applied the paints to the canvas, or is it the history of who owned the painting across the months or years or centuries?

What constitutes a "complete understanding" of a video game?

Earlier Vella discusses how 'proceduralism' fails to capture something necessary for the ludic sublime:

QuoteThe primary objection to the proceduralist perspective[..] In presenting the logically-constructed cosmos as the objective game system in itself, proceduralist approaches short-circuit the gap between the objective game in itself [the noumenon, which as stated is not available to the perceiving subject], as a computational materiality existing independently of the player's experience of it, and the game-as-cosmos that is the result of the player's analytical attempt [a mere attempt!] at imposing rule-based, conceptual coherence upon her experience of the game.

QuoteThe player, then, remains aware of an essential, and unbridgeable, gap, between her experience of the game, her understanding of the game as system, and her awareness of an underlying implied game object: as I shall argue, it is in this gap that we can locate the operations of the ludic sublime.

I'm very much enjoying 'No Mastery Without Mystery', but I started this thread because of this section in particular which I'll quote in full, unedited:

QuoteIn his critique of "metaphysical" systems that make a claim to essential knowledge of things, Kant argues that, with respect to such theories, "the proud name of ontology[the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being], which presumes to offer synthetic a priori[in a way based on theoretical deduction rather than empirical observation] cognitions of things in general [..] must give way to the more modest title of a transcendental analytic"(2004[1781], 1247/B304) [i do not know what these numbers mean]. In other words: systems of thought which claim to provide an account of things-in-the-world as they are in themselves, independently of their appearance against the horizon of our experience, in fact do no such thing: they are 'merely' proposing what Kant terms a "transcendental analytic". We cannot have unmediated access to things-in-themselves: what we have are our sensory intuitions of objects, acted upon by the faculty of the understanding. This means that for any understanding of the world-- even those which claim to transcend the domain of appearances-- the ground of knowledge is always the appearance, or phenomenon: the object as perceived. Such projects, Kant suggests, make the mistake of confusing the phenomenon with the noumenon: the ideal object that exists independently of its being perceived. Though the latter may be posited, it is only the phenomenon which is available to the perceiving subject as an object-of-thought.

This shit rules, I guess it's time to start reading Kant

In some way the word "mastery" plays into this quite well; relating mastery to the sublime: to master some thing is to discover and acknowledge a superiority above it...

One major header from Video Games and the Sublime reads "Gameplay: stuplimity or flow?" and to apply my previous thought to this, as well as what Frank Lantz said (link to be found) about "hooks," the sublime is found in a transcendent escape -- requiring a place safe -- from stuplimity, from flow, and from gameplay. Ngai's stuplimity is "the danger" that "we must regard ourselves as safe [against] in order to feel this [sublime] inspiring satisfaction."

If the sublime comes from "revealing the self's final superiority to nature" (p266) and evokes an "inspiriting satisfaction" (p266) then I suppose I feel as though my experience of the sublime comes from a recognition of my superiority to gameplay, which has given me a sense of inspiriting satisfaction...

pingback Ugly Feelings

Quotethe sublime is found in a transcendent escape -- requiring a place safe -- from stuplimity, from flow, and from gameplay.

The abovementioned "discarding" is present in the sublime as well: a safety from danger. What if we rewrote the concluding sentence with the understanding that this "discarding" is a foundational element of some sense of the sublime?

In and of themselves, contemporary electronic artefacts are both impenetrable and ephemeral – the fruits of human labour and ingenuity deployed in the form of aesthetic objects designed to entertain, and then [..] to ascend beyond, to be perceived as ultimately inferior by the observer.

currently I perceive stuplimity not on the same plane as the sublime but as a lesser category of thing -- a reaction which a person might have and then seek to be safe from. the sublime requires a "safe place" while the stuplime does not, because the stuplime is the "danger" alone.

Quote from: p268The precondition for experiencing the sublime, and the dynamical sublime in particular, is that the observer feel safely removed from the object that inspires this emotion. [..] while both Kantian and popularized versions of the sublime might be conscripted to account for the astonishment, awe, or "respect" that a massive, even stupefying text like Americans solicits from its reader, no theory of sublimity seems adequately equipped to account for its concomitantly solicited effect of boredom. [..] this boredomi s absolutely central to Stein's quasi-scientific experiment with sentences and paragraphs in Americans [..] Yet the passivity, duration, and ignoble status of boredom would seem to contradict nearly all aspects of the sublime[..]

Stuplimity...

Quote from: p271[..] reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as a totality

Quote from: p273[..] drags us downward into the realm of words rather than transporting us upward toward an unrepresentable divine.

Quote from: p270[..] the sublime cannot [..] account for the affective response elicited by enormous, agglutinative works like Atlas or Americans, since here the initial experience of being aesthetically overwhelmed involves not terror or pain (eventually superseded by tranquility), but something much closer to an ordinary fatigue—and one that cannot be neutralized, like the sublime's terror, by a competing affect. [..] the reader's or observer's faculties become strained to their limits in the effort to comprehend the work as a whole, but the revelation of this failure is conspicuously less dramatic—and does not, in the end, confirm the self's sense of superiority over the overwhelming or intimidating object.

Quote from: Summary/Review on torontopubliclibrary.caWith its promises about the saving of time; the reduction of labor; and the expansion of value, the gimmick gives us tantalizing glimpses of a world in which social life will no longer be organized by labor, but also of one regenerating the conditions that keep labor's social necessity in place.

By the way: I agree with this concluding sentence, and I'm not happy about any of it.

The concluding sentence:

QuoteIn and of themselves, contemporary electronic artefacts are both impenetrable and ephemeral – the fruits of human labour and ingenuity deployed in the form of aesthetic objects designed to entertain, and then to be discarded.

I will likely make the attempt to return to this text. It's speaking to me, saying things I have been saying to myself but in different ways, with references to outside texts and perspectives that I have not encountered myself. I think I'd like to start by reading some of these. I should make myself a reading list!

I will not quote anything from the section that immediately follows -- it's hard for me to comprehend -- but the argument that I believe is being made is that the interruption of the 'perpetually coherent gameworld' can produce a feeling of the sublime, of the infinite, of the incomprehensible. Then it continues thus, contradicting such an argument:

QuoteOnce the functional bond – the interface – between the subject and the game is broken, the subject experiences a momentary glimpse of technology as an inhuman other.
[..] the initial glimpse of technology-as-other is followed by nothing more elevating than frustration.
[..] The dissolution of the technologically enabled self is both catastrophic and utterly banal: marked by a profound sense of rupture and loss, situated in the mundane reality of the post-human everyday.