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Sep 30, 2017
I think about this passage in @doougle's thesis a lot. doougle.net/phd/Designing_…
First and foremost, systems-centric theories tend to conflate computer games with software, and interactivity with computation. Crawford, for instance, specifies that the task of the game designer is “to automate interactivity, to replace one of the participants in the conversation with a machine” (p.77, emphasis mine). Adams and Rollings make a similar point, explaining that it is the computer that enforces the rules of videogames: “In most video games, the computer sets the boundary of the magic circle because player actions are meaningful in the game only if the machine can detect them with its input devices” (p.18). It's not so surprising, then, that design thinkers like Crawford, Adams and Rollings, and Humble dismiss the notion of radically open-ended computer games. Their skepticism is that the science of artificial intelligence is simply not advanced enough to improvise new rules or author custom-tailored content for us. Adams and Rollings, for example, write: “No computer can create absolutely unconstrained play; software can offer the player only the actions that the designer chooses to implement, and the program will always be limited by the amount of memory available” (p.138). Note that in this view, the task of “creating” gameplay is largely framed as a technical challenge - one delegated to the machine. Bogost, likewise, shortchanges the “procedural” capabilities of human beings. He writes: “Because procedurality is intrinsic and fundamental to computers, and because computers are much more flexible as an inscription medium than human agents, they are particular suited to procedural expression” (2007, p.10). Human beings, as Bogost sees it, are less reliable: “It is difficult to coerce even a small group of people to execute a particular process again and again, without rest and without incentive” (p.10). Bogost's particular framing here betrays a subtle but problematic assumption. In evoking the metaphor of “inscription” and the image of executing a “particular” process “again and again,” Bogost depicts videogame rulesets as necessarily coherent and stable. This assumption is perhaps most apparent in his claim that “the gestures, experiences, and interactions a game's rules allow (and disallow) make up the game's significance” (2008b, p.121). Here, as in Crawford's and Adams and Rollings' work, it is the rules themselves that “allow” interaction. Authority is ceded to the machine. Bogost (2006) emphasizes our ability to interpret, reflect on, and respond to game systems, but he fails to adequately account for how authored rules - even computational ones - are inevitably repurposed and destabilized by human actors who fuse them together with their own personal, social, and cultural practices. A critical shortcoming of these perspectives is that they forget that human beings, too, are good at “interactivity.” When we focus so intently on computation, we risk overlooking alternative views on interaction design. Games like B.U.T.T.O.N. and J.S. Joust foreground how we might conceptualize the computer not as a singular authority tasked with orchestrating interactivity on our behalf, but rather as a material - one that can be shaped by both designers and players. The problem with systems-centric theories is that they so frequently neglect (even if they do so unintentionally) these alternative design possibilities, almost as if they didn't even exist.
Sep 30, 2017
Consider a computer which is not an "authority", synthesizing some virtual world and enforcing its rules, but rather
Sep 30, 2017
a "material", in the real world, which we use and shape in a physical and human context that the computer is only minimally aware of.
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