The Beauty of Games

[droqen]

p30?

Games 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".
 

[droqen]

p32?

All 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?

. . . 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?

"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?

. . . 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.

[droqen]

p34?

Even 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.

[droqen]

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.

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

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

Ego . . . 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.

Companionship . . . 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!

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

noooooooooooooooo

[droqen]

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.

[droqen]

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

[droqen]

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

[droqen]

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

[droqen]

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

[droqen]

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.

[droqen]

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.

[droqen]

Philip Zimbardo

[droqen]

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!

[droqen]

i would like to live in the world.