“a procedural rhetoric does not argue a position but rather characterizes an idea.” ⤴️
“These games say something about how an experience of the world works, how it feels to experience or to be subjected to some sort of situation:” ⤴️
“Proceduralist games are oriented toward introspection over both immediate gratification, as is usually the case in entertainment games, and external action, whether immediate or deferred, as is usually the case in serious games.” ⤴️
“The goal of the proceduralist designer is to cause the player to reflect on one or more themes during or after play, without a concern for resolution or effect. The use of identifiably human yet still abstract roles in these games underscores the invitation to project one’s own experiences and ideas on them.” ⤴️
“these games tend to reject verisimilitude in favour of abstraction.” ⤴️
“aesthetic: reducing the player’s obsession with decoration underscores the experience of processes while still allowing image, sound, and text to meaningfully clarify the fiction of the game’s theme.” ⤴️
“As far as story is concerned, procedural works tend to employ metaphor or vignette instead of narrative.” ⤴️
“No matter the level of abstraction, proceduralist works don’t equate higher abstraction with lower production value.” ⤴️
“Games like Go and Tetris are abstract; if they have any about-ness, it is limited to the experience of the system itself. One can make representational claims about these games (Janet Murray has called Tetris “the perfect enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans”), but only in an overtly metaphoric way.” ⤴️
“Their systems characterize a subject not by accident of genre or convention but through deliberate selection—often inspired by a solitary creator’s personal experience.” ⤴️
“There’s an ambiguity of both form and signification in these works.” ⤴️
“combine concrete, identifiable situations with abstract tokens, objects, goals, or actions” ⤴️
“more poetic and less direct way to express the ideas or scenarios their processes represent.” ⤴️
“proceduralism shares some of the values of expressionism in art, especially as both relate to the subjective interpretation of emotion.” ⤴️
“As the name implies, proceduralist games are process intensive—they rely primarily on computational rules to produce their artistic meaning. In these games, expression arises primarily from the player’s interaction with the game’s mechanics and dynamics, and less so (in some cases almost not at all) in their visual, aural, and textual aspects. These games lay bare the form, allowing meaning to emanate from a model.” ⤴️
“A procedural rhetoric makes a claim about how something works by modelling its processes in the process-native environment of the computer rather than using description (writing) or depiction (images).” ⤴️
“Rohrer, Jonathan Blow, and Rod Humble, […] I suggest the term proceduralism to characterize the style represented partly by these three and a few others. It is not a name for all […] games by the creators just mentioned [but] a style they have embraced deliberately and successfully.” ⤴️->
“Blow’s game Braid takes the seemingly familiar genre of the platformer and turns it into an allegorical exploration of the themes of time and regret.” ⤴️->
“Braid poses questions about doubt, forgiveness, time, and regret, offering the player an opportunity to pursue the question, “what if I could go back,” in different ways.” ⤴️
“The game offers its player the ability to rewind time, allowing recovery from mistakes […] In one world, certain objects are unaffected by time manipulation. In another, character movement to the right moves time forward, and movement to the left moves it in reverse. […] The game, in Humble’s words, “is my expression of how a marriage feels.”” ⤴️->
“While quite different in nature, Braid, Passage, and The Marriage share several common properties, some related to desired effect, some related to method of creation, and some related to form.” ->