How to Do Things with Videogames

Media Microecology

• [Shirky assumes] “the potential collective impact of online communications justifies the more mundane and [as Carr would have it] pointless uses of media” ⤴️
• “Carr’s worry about the Web’s tendency to encourage skin-deep thinking about unimportant subjects does ring true. But Shirky’s account of the surprisingly political amalgam of all those seemingly useless, skin-deep comments also demands acknowledgment.” ⤴️
• “technology neither saves nor condemns us. It influences us, of course, changing how we perceive, conceive of, and interact with our world.” ⤴️
• “McLuhan calls a medium an extension of ourselves for just this reason: it structures and informs our understanding and behaviour.” ⤴️
• “the Internet extends us in both remarkable and unremarkable ways.” ⤴️
• “the Web offers just as many mundane uses as it does remarkable ones. Probably more.” ⤴️
• “technological spectacularism.” ⤴️
• “I’m going to insist on it as a media philosophy: we can understand the relevance of a medium by looking at the variety of things it does.” ⤴️
• “We can think of a medium’s explored uses as a spectrum, a possibility space that extends from purely artistic uses at one end (the decisive moment photograph) to purely instrumental uses at the other (the hardware store snapshot). In a given medium, many of these uses are known and well explored, while others are new and emerging.” ⤴️
• ““the medium is the message.” His point was that the things a medium does to a culture are more important than the content it conveys.” ⤴️
• “McLuhan’s influence helped steer scholarly, journalistic, and public attention toward the effects a medium exerts on society (the way the Web changes how we think, socialize, work, and play).” ⤴️
• “Videogames, the subject of this book, also have properties that precede their content: games are models of experiences rather than textual descriptions or visual depictions of them.” ⤴️
• “When we play games, we operate those models, our actions constrained by their rules: the urban dynamics of SimCity” ⤴️
• “The content and context of a media artifact is not as inessential as McLuhan would have it. The medium is the message, but the message is the message, too.” ⤴️
• “Instead of ignoring it, we ought to explore the relationships between the general properties of a medium and the particular situations in which it is used.” ⤴️
• “Games—like photography, like writing, like any medium— shouldn’t be shoehorned into one of two kinds of uses, serious or superficial, highbrow or lowbrow, useful or useless. Neither entertainment nor seriousness nor the two together should be a satisfactory account for what videogames are capable of.” ⤴️
• “we know intuitively that writing, sound, images, and moving pictures can all be put to many different uses.” ⤴️
• “Such an attitude requires us to expand our understanding of media ecology. In McLuhan’s terms, the media ecosystem entails “arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another.” ⤴️
• “media-agnostic approach to understanding how a host of different technologies works individually and together to create an environment for communication and perception.” ⤴️
• “you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.” ⤴️
• “the individual range of functions afforded by a particular medium’s properties could be compared to a microhabitat, a small, specialized environment within a larger ecosystem.” ⤴️
• “not merely an aspect of the woods but also an agent in its own right” ⤴️
• “the dedicated media ecologist must be concerned not only with the overall ecosystem but also with the distinctive functions of its components. Media micro- ecology, we might call it.” ⤴️
• “like the ecologist reveals the unseen purposes of a decomposing log, so the media ecologist must do with particular media forms.” ⤴️
• “specialized, focused attention to a single medium, digging deep into one dark, unexplored corner of a media ecosystem” ⤴️
• “documentation of its variety and application” ⤴️
• “only after conducting such an investigation that we should feel qualified to consider distinct varieties of a medium as promising or threatening to a particular way of life.” ⤴️
• “we might well feel less certain of such definitive moral positions anyway.” ⤴️
• “understanding games as a me- dium of leisure or productivity alone is insufficient. Instead, I suggest we imagine the videogame as a medium with valid uses across the spectrum, from art to tools and everything in between.” ⤴️
• “videogames are already becoming a pervasive medium, one as interwoven with culture as writing and images.” ⤴️

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Art

• “Are videogames art?” ⤴️

• “film critic Roger Ebert’s declaration that “the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art.”” ⤴️

• “Jim Preston, it’s an absurd and useless question: To think that there is a single, generally agreed upon concept of art is to get it precisely backwards.” ⤴️

• “Forget games, art doesn’t have any sort of stable meaning in contemporary culture anyway.” ⤴️

• “the twentieth-century avant-garde changed art for good.” ⤴️

• “localized movements in Europe gained attention by rejecting traditionalism.” ⤴️

• “The futurists called for a total reinvention of cultural and political life.” ⤴️

• “Dada scorned artistic and social conventions in favour of absurd- ism and recontextualization.” ⤴️

• “As the last century wore on, it became much harder to distinguish art by its form or function alone; context became the predominant factor, its arbitrariness exposed forever by Duchamp’s urinal.” ⤴️

• “the history of art is strewn with the babes and corpses of movements that hoped to reimagine or reinvent their predecessors” ⤴️

• “The Gothic style of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries preferred elongation, ornament, and angles in sculpture, architecture, and painting. The Renaissance perfected perspective. Realism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused on portrayals of everyday life, itself spawning numerous movements of their own right such as postimpressionism and the Pre-Raphaelites.” ⤴️

• “From the long perspective of history, the very idea that “art” means something monolithic and certain is absurd” ⤴️

• “in the last century especially, it has primarily tried to bother and provoke us.” ⤴️

• “videogames’ legal status as speech, a common counter- argument among videogame apologists” ⤴️

• “repurposing of familiar game imagery as folk art homage, in crafts for sale on Etsy.com or as cakes featured on videogame blogs.” ⤴️

• “granting gallery status to game stills and concept art by hanging them in exhibitions at trade conventions” ⤴️

• “the idea of “games as art,” or artgames, to use the designer Jason Rohrer’s term, does offer some insight on its own. It suggests that games can be construed natively as art, within the communities of practice and even the industry of games, rather than by pledging fealty to the fine art kingdom.” ⤴️

• “These are games that get exhibited, not games that get played.” ⤴️

• “We must look deeper, to the particularities of specific aesthetic trends in game development itself, in hopes of identifying their positions in relation to games and art alike.” ⤴️

• proceduralist artgames

• “When we ponder the subjective themes of human experience, it’s hard to do so in relation to the nameless anonymity of corporate creation. Thus the strong presence of a human author is prevalent in these games, whether an individual or individually identified members of a small group. The concept of authorship incorporates another feature of art more broadly: the pursuit of a particular truth irrespective of the demands of reception or sales.” ⤴️

• “The sense that the artifact has something to relate and will not relent until that thing is ex- pressed, rather than an experience to be optimized, is at work here.” ⤴️

• “we must not mistake authorship for intention. The intentional fallacy, which rejects the idea that a work’s meaning or value is related to the creator’s intention, is still at work in games. Player agency in games of all kinds leads to unique interpretations of play experiences; in proceduralist works, such meaning generation is spurred by the knowledge that a specific human being set the work’s processes into motion.” ⤴️

• “Artistic styles, movements, and traditions sometimes arrive via the declaration of a group of artists, as was the case with the manifestos of the early twentieth century.” ⤴️

• ““Realtime Art Manifesto”” ⤴️

• “In other cases, critics and historians describe the emergence and evolution of a style during or after the fact.” ⤴️

• “Whether the creators mentioned above would embrace the proceduralist is an open question, but such a matter need not undermine the usefulness of describing a style in the process of maturation.” ⤴️

• “As a style, proceduralism takes a stand contrary to conventional wisdom in game design.” ⤴️

• “At a time when videogames focus on player gratification, proceduralism invites player introspection.” ⤴️

• “proceduralism lays bare the subjective truth of an individual creator.” ⤴️

• “it serves much the same purpose as did futurism or Dada: to issue a specific challenge to a medium from within it.” ⤴️