GAME 340

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 1: Art

“art doesn’t have any sort of stable meaning in contemporary culture anyway” (9)

Futurism, Dada, avant-garde (9)

Gothic architecture, Renaissance perspective, Realist everyday life, postimpressionism and the Pre-Raphaelites (10)

“there are no unified field theories of art” (10)

“the history of art has been one of disruption and reinvention, one of conflicting trends and ideas within each historical period” (10)

“Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Tzara, Yoko Ono, [[Jackson Pollock]], Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, [[Nam Jun Paik]]” (11)

“Art changes. Its very purpose, we might say, is to change, and to change us along with it” (11)

“the idea of ‘games as art,’ or art-games, 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” (11)

“what we lack are discussions of the developing conventions, styles, movements through which games are participating in a broader concept of art, both locally and historically” (12)

“I suggest the term proceduralism” (12)

“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. I suggest five: procedural rhetoric, introspection, abstraction, subjective representation, and strong authorship” (13)

“proceduralist games are process intensive—they rely primarily on computational rules to produce their artistic meaning” (13)

“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” (13)

“These games lay bare the form, allowing meaning to emanate from a model” (13)

“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” (14)

“proceduralist works deploy a more poetic and less direct way to express the ideas or scenarios their processes represent” (16)

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 2: Empathy

“Darfur Is Dying and Disaffected! notwithstanding, operationalized weakness is not new to games. In Ico, for example, the player takes responsibility for an almost helpless companion. But we can trace the dynamic back much farther, to one of the most maligned titles in videogame history: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari Video Computer System (VCS)”

“No matter their frequency, complaints about E.T. assume that games must fulfill roles of power, that they must put us in shoes bigger than our own, and that we must be satisfied with those roles. But Spielberg’s film was not about the terrific power of aliens invading … It was a film about alienation, not about aliens” (20)

“Warshaw’s videogame respected this core principle, whether or not it meant to” (20)

“Perhaps in 1982 the world was not ready for a videogame about the loneliness and frailty of an extraterrestrial. But, oddly, we were ready for a film about it. E.T.’s role in the videogame crash has surely been overstated, but certainly players and developers alike have used its failure as part of an ongoing excuse to embrace only roles of power, and never those of weakness” (23)

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 3: Reverence

“Churches have a long history of providing alms, community, safe houses, care, and passage. The earliest hospitals were often created by bishops and other clergy to serve the local poor and sick, or travelers on pilgrimage. In the fictional backstory of Resistance, Manchester Cathedral had been converted for use as a hospital during the Chimera’s initial attack” (27)

“in the face of this apocalypse, the church carried out its charter, to support people in need, to stand resolved in the face of death” (27)

“Manchester Cathedral cements this sense of place in the game. The cathedral is an impressive monument, a marker of cultural and social heritage with a long history” (28)

“Apocalypse films often use monuments—the White House, the Empire State Building—as symbols for total destruction … But Resistance does not use Manchester Cathedral in this way. The Chimera have no interest in destroying a monument, nor do they have any concern for ailing, human civilians in a makeshift church hospital” (28)

“The game’s detailed, accurate re-creation of the cathedral, as well the structure’s symbolic isolation in its own special level, encourages the player to pay attention to the structure. It is not just another anonymous row house or shack or factory. Instead, it’s a structure of note, a unique place, one that demands respect” (28)

“The cathedral does not become a symbol of humanity’s annihilation but of the Chimera’s total disregard for human culture and creativity” (29)

“the cathedral serves a purpose in the game consonant with its role in the world: that of reprieve for the weary and steadfastness in the face of devastation” (30)

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 4: Music

“listening is only one way we experience music” (30)

“In the ancient world, for example, music and literature were indistinguishable. Epic poetry like that of Homer wasn’t read in bound volumes but sung by minstrels who performed for groups” (30)

“The plainchant (most know it better as the Gregorian chant, thanks to a compilation made by Pope Gregory the Great in the seventh century) wasn’t intended to be particularly musical, but to prime the listener for spiritual reflection” (30)

“By the twelfth century jongleurs revisited the ancient oral tradition, performing songs and tricks in the streets and courts of medieval Europe” (30)

“by the sixteenth century composers were penning music for church and concert alike” (30)

“Music became more theatrical, with stagings of orchestras and, of course, opera’s emergence in the seventeenth century” (30)

“The melodic age of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw music rise to the level of art” (30)

“The twentieth century witnessed new styles, among them jazz, which secularized the sacred traditions of music and movement in Africa and blended them with the instrumental and performative role of music in the West” (30-31)

“While much of the history of music takes place in the public space of ritual or diversion, videogames enter the picture at a time when more and more cultural activity began to take place at home” (31)

“Instead of listening, watching, dancing, or otherwise taking in music, videogames offer a way to perform it” (32)

“videogames offer something subtly different than playing a traditional instrument: just as Atari Video Music renders audio on a television screen in a new, unexpected way, so videogames apply a distortion to musical performance, shedding new light on seemingly familiar songs, sounds, or rhythms” (32)

“The experience of playing a song again and again in Guitar Hero or Rock Band, at higher and higher levels and toward greater and greater mastery, does not lead the player to a greater state of mastery as a musician but to a greater depth of understanding as a listener” (34)

“This ratcheting up from basics to fluency makes these games music performance games, not just rhythm action games” (34)

“plastic guitar, rhythm stylus, and visualizer remind us that music and games share a fundamental property: both are playable, offering their listeners and operators an expressive experience within the framework of melody and rhythm” (36)

How To Do Things With Videogames, Chapter 5: Pranks

“Pranks are a type of dark humor that trace a razor’s edge between amusement and injury” (37)

“But risk also gives pranks their social power” (37)

“Despite their clear status as prank, Easter eggs play jokes on games’ sponsors or publishers but do not turn the games themselves into pranks” (38)

“Historically, there are many examples of pranks as confrontational responses to social and cultural situations. The Dadaists embraced anti-art like the nonsense poetry of Tristan Tzara and the found art of Marcel Duchamp” (41)

“Dada pranks the rationalist ideals of West. In the 1950s the beat concept of the Happening popularized public performance art, a concept the situationists made political in the 1960s” (41)

“Situations helped lay the cultural groundwork for more recent public pranks like flash mobs, which often draw attention to how public space has become privatized or monitored” (41)

“Pranks like situations and flash mobs first amuse, or distract, or disturb just like any other gag. But they also dig deep into social conventions, laying them bare in mockery and reclaiming them in liberation” (41)

“A better example of a game convention prank is Syobon Action (Dejected Action), a Japanese platformer also known in the West as ‘Cat-Mario’ or simply ‘Mario from Hell.’ The game is playable, challenging, and enjoyable, but it is constructed in a way that defies every expectation of Mario-style platform conventions” (42)

“the game demands that the player undertake bizarre and arbitrary routes. It punishes rather than rewards genre conventions, like item collection” (42)