The Beauty of Games (2nd read)

[droqen]

Re: Frank Lantz'
"The Beauty of Games"

[droqen]

For Hilary,
No one can tell us what to do.

This is a great dedication.

[droqen]

On Thinking Playfully

- cute book (form factor)
- would i carry this around in a pocket, plinking away at its pages?
- one of many Playful Thinking books
- video games are a flourishing medium
- "new ways of using games to think about the rest of the world."

[droqen]

i'm getting through chapter 1, trying to understand what lantz is saying and conveying

i'm struggling to read this and not burst with that certain contradictory emotion that goes by the name "kill gameplay", my constant companion and reaction to the idea of 'the aesthetic form of thinking and doing'.

lantz addresses this feeling but not to my satisfaction! p49-50:

In games we exert great effort, expending valuable resources and precious energy, in pursuit of arbitrary, nonsensical goals. . . . Is it any wonder that, in the sober light of day, from the perspective of ordinary life--in which we are trying to do real work, solve real problems, and get actual things done--we look at games with a certain amount of suspicion, even hostility?

i could paraphrase this as speaking directly to me, to 'kill gameplay':

"Is it any wonder that [droqen wants to kill gameplay]?"
"Is it any wonder that [kill gameplay resonates]?"

his response on p50 is...

This is not a tension that can or should be resolved. . . . In pursuing a grand unified theory of games as culture we must remain aware of and tolerant of this something-else-entirely, the weirdness of games. In fact, we should seek to enjoy and appreciate it. As tempting as it may be to . . . explain or justify [games] within the sober framework of ordinary life, any such victory would come at a fatal cost. To do so would be to domesticate games, to tame the unruly wildness that is the essential source of their power.

i'm almost with you, but what??? listen i'm all on board to go on a wild ride, but what is the unruly wildness? what is their power? what, what, what, lantz?

"it's beautiful if you ignore the ways in which it is not beautiful" ???

[droqen]

in chapter 2, lantz begins to speak of the beauty of Go, as his first example of how games (p51-52) "can create beauty and meaning--through the qualities of their underlying systems and the experiences they produce. . .", an example included instrumentally because ". . . it is important to correct for the potential mistaken impression that videogames are beautiful and meaningful to the degree that they incorporate other existing forms--story, graphics, and sound."

he also discusses poker.

then,

(p85) "Perhaps game designers are like architects who construct rooms. And the rooms can be more or less beautiful in terms of their size and proportions and materials. And there is a species of creatures called players drawn by this beauty who will sometimes occupy a room. And these creatures will use the room for their rituals and ceremonies, ceremonies which themselves can be extraordinarily beautiful. . . . [This] beauty is deeply connected to, but not identical to, the beauty of the room itself."

[droqen]

p85-86

"Perhaps all aesthetics has this second-order quality . . . Maybe paintings and poems . . . [also] produce beauty and meaning in collaboration with their viewers and readers. But somehow this seems more pronounced in games . . ."

ok! good! lantz is addressing something that was on my mind, let's see what i was saying and relate it to what i'm saying now.

my bleet

. . . if a procedure generates an artifact which provokes a response, to which do we ascribe that "aesthetic"?

if i am a painter, and i make a "beautiful" painting, do we take that adjective--beauty--and apply it equally to everything that was part of its creation? is the paintbrush beautiful? is the canvas beautiful? am i beautiful? is my practice of painting beautiful? my studio, my hands, my life?

i'm having trouble with this categorical difference, because of the intangible object of differing experience that lies between the instructions and the player. usually it's a mental object! how do we describe such material differences?

if i watch a play and i talk about something unique that happened the one time i watched the play, for example, one of the actors had a sneezing fit at an appropriate time and everyone had a great time improvising around it i have to refer to the one instance of the play, not the play itself? right?

so do i think that games are somehow special in this way? i think that games' rooms are more... bounded. there is this space in which they, instructive overlords, prevent certain 'interpretations', regard them as explicitly invalid... it's annoying!!!

why do i want to kill gameplay? i am not so interested in participating in systems which are so interested in my activity that they seek to control it, reject possibilities. what lantz writes about these creatures, "players," this is all humans, right? i like rooms. i like rooms that invite, rooms full of toys, rooms that are beautiful to regard.

perhaps game designers are a subset of architects, those who construct rooms with constraints. locked doors, walls, purpose-built to frustrate passage. the aesthetic form of...

whatever this is.

[droqen]

but perhaps i am not interested in lantz' "aesthetic forms" at all, even though i am drawn to creating them. i make aesthetics in spite of a deeply-held disinterest in many of their aspects.

[droqen]

back to p50 in which lantz writes, "In pursuing a grand unified theory of games as culture we must remain aware of and tolerant of this something-else-entirely, the weirdness of games. In fact, we should seek to enjoy and appreciate it."

i wonder, what is the relevance of this grand theory to appreciation and enjoyment?

suppose this something-else-entirely is something which lantz cannot expunge from his life... he searches for justification: 'why do i participate in this, even though i cannot justify it?'

suppose the search for a grand unifying theory is a smokescreen, one of these suitsian goals that exists to produce — justify — some activity.

then, when lantz says ". . . we must remain aware of and tolerant of this . . . We should seek to enjoy and appreciate it", notably exacerbating the call for acceptance into a call for actual liking, it seems as though it could be plain and simple reframing.

'here's something admittedly wasteful which i am driven to do; i had better accept it; no, even better, i had better convince myself that i like it — that i love it — that it is of great cultural importance!'

[droqen]

it's a good day to be dead tired on my feet and reading The Beauty of Games

this deadening of some part of the mind is somehow necessary for proper digestion

p103, ". . . games are the aesthetic form of instrumental reason. . . . an art form whose raw material is instrumental reason, . . . This doesn't mean that games are merely a celebration of instrumental reason."

[droqen]

p104 "Yes, in games we often indulge our capacity for instrumental reason, . . . But also, in games we sometimes smother it or invert it. . . . [games are] an opportunity to reflect on instrumental reason, to contemplate it, investigate it. . . . We do these things in pursuit of meaning and beauty. That's what aesthetic forms are."

[droqen]

p105 "For Kant, the truth in beauty is the recognition that the pleasure one feels in its presence is something that other humans would also feel. Even though this feeling is happening to us. . . we are human and our responses have some inevitable overlap with other people's. Beauty, for Kant, is this recognition that we are not alone."

not alone.  this is an identification of aesthetics which resonates with me, it mirrors Alexander's mirror-of-the-self test's approaching some public thing, many other things... as mentioned, am sleepy. but i am turning

[droqen]

I must have missed this part because of the AI stuff turning me off too hard:

[droqen]

p157

. . . there are many serious critics of this new mode of thing and organization. Critics who point out that it is in cahoots with existing power structures. . . . That it is too reductive and mechanical to capture any of the truly important qualities of human life.

Yes, it me

[droqen]

But, . . . we should not allow ourselves to slip into cynicism and despair regarding the potential of systems thinking [wait, why would we?] and the storm of cognitive and organizational changes . . . This genie wouldn't go back in its bottle even if we wanted it to. Which is fine, because we're going to need its help to clean up some of the messes we've made with our first few wishes.

What??? Like, yeah, fine, this is Lantz' position — power is here, so let's use it. But the justification... it feels like an awful glib papering over of the way damage is done by this exact attitude.

[droqen]

p159

. . . what a genuine systems literacy would provide, is a method for successfully navigating the postmodern condition. . . . This perspective would not be anti-system . . . But would acknowledge the necessary limitations of systems . . . capable of effectively harnessing the power of systems while remaining aware that every system is partial, nonuniversal, incomplete.