tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-39135061718282625552024-03-21T06:18:35.940-07:00wombflash forestmusic gamesDavid Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-87157385274206154132015-04-27T21:45:00.002-07:002015-04-27T21:45:56.540-07:00Intro to Ludic Ecologonomy (Pt. 1) <div class="p1">
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<span class="s1"><b><i>ARGUMENT</i></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><i>Game Form is</i></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><i> Ecological and Economical, </i></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><i>neither one reducible to the other; </i></b></span></div>
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<b><i>Eco coming from </i></b><i><b>οἶκος for household</b></i></div>
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<i><b>Economy meaning Management of the household</b></i></div>
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<i><b>Ecology meaning Ground of the household</b></i></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><i>The Economic aspect is described well by </i></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><i>the optimal strategies of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Behavior-Princeton-Classic-Editions/dp/0691130612/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1430174698&sr=1-1&keywords=von+neumann+games">Game Theory</a></i></b></span></div>
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<b><i>Games as RULES</i></b></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><i>The Ecological aspect is described </i></b></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><i>by</i></b></span><b><i> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Ecological-Approach-Visual-Perception/dp/0898599598">Ecological Psychology</a></i></b></div>
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<b><i>Games as AFFORDANCES</i></b></div>
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<b><i>Computer games are complex toys</i></b></div>
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<b><i>Like financial derivatives</i></b></div>
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<b><i>All software Toys:</i></b></div>
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<b><i><a href="http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf">Turing's choice-machine</a></i></b></div>
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<b><i><a href="http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf">from his 1936 paper (section 2)</a></i></b></div>
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<b><i>"whose motion is only partially </i></b></div>
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<b><i>determined by the configuration"</i></b></div>
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<b><i>The existence of computer games </i></b></div>
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<b><i>As Games</i></b></div>
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<b><i>redefines Toys As Games</i></b></div>
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<b><i>Because we call them games</i></b></div>
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<b><i>But they are toys</i></b></div>
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<b><i>Toys have AFFORDANCES</i></b></div>
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<span class="s1"><b><i>but NO RULES</i></b></span></div>
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<b><i>All games have affordances</i></b></div>
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<b><i>Not all games have rules</i></b></div>
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<b><i>Ecology is the Ground of the Economy</i></b></div>
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<b><i>Ignoring this Ground is proving deadly on a Global scale</i></b></div>
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<span class="s1"><i>This has been sitting around for a while.</i></span><i> It's what I intended to speak about at the NYU Practice conference last year, but got sidetracked by some videogame prehistory-- Here’s a video of that talk, I start talking ~ 33 minutes in, after a nice Counter Strike level design talk and introduction from the wonderful Robert Yang: </i></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/125149690" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> <br />
<a href="https://vimeo.com/125149690">PRACTICE 2014: CS:Go & David Kanaga</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user6998742">NYU Game Center</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: x-large;">0.</span></div>
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The point of the ongoing theoretical project I'm working on is ~ to attempt constructing a 'formalism' of games which allows <i>GAME</i> to mean (very broadly!) <i>played form, </i>no goals, optima, etc. required-- a FORMAL GAME which is as inclusive as possible of all the strange & diverse forms available for designers/players to work with. I am convinced that abstractions which accommodate new strange forms are better than no abstractions at all, because "no abstractions" just means "the status quo abstractions"-- so I am attached to formality and its search for new abstractions.<br />
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The goal is to be scientific about it. I am convinced that the raw materials of 'computer games' have radicalized the meaning of the concept 'game' more than some folks have yet caught on to. The machine is fully formal, already a FORMAL GAME. Logic and mathematics are its 'blood', and these are already games of a sort. As mathematician Paul Cohen writes, describing briefly a history of formal logic leading up to Gödel's famous proof --<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">"According to the Formalist point of view, mathematics should be regarded as a fully formal game played with marks on paper, and the only requirement this game need fulfill is that it does not lead to an inconsistency [...] In these notes, our first object will be to describe how a mathemarical system can be reduced to a purely formal game" (<i>Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis</i>, p. 3)</span></blockquote>
The play of any sting of computation, or what is computed-- <i>a theorem-- </i>is already a formal game, and there is nothing at the level of 'goals/no-goals' or whatever other epiphenomenal nonsense, which can prevent a piece of computation from being a game.<br />
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The animal (our self) who plays with the computer, however, is NOT fully formal, and thus what is perhaps an inconsistency is introduced, between the formal game of the machine and the informal game of the animal-- there is a fascinating tension at the point of contact between the mechanic and the organic, and this tension is the driving energy of the theory here considered.<br />
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<span class="s1">To this end, LUDIC ECOLOGONOMY is designed as a partner piece to the <i>flux dogma</i>, that aesthetic doctrine which is obsessed with <i>variability</i>, and which I ‘articulated’ in the “Object, Substance, Organism” presentation from last year’s GDC: </span></div>
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<a href="https://vimeo.com/90271157">Music Object, Substance, Organism (GDC 14)</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user1622843">David Kanaga</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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<span class="s1">I described that talk as ‘wet’; </span></div>
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<span class="s1">This one, to the contrary, is my ‘dry’ take on games formalism-- <i>forgetting the expressive particularities of the player for a moment... </i></span></div>
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<span class="s1">Alongside the variability or <i>play</i> of games, there exist its constants or <i>invariants-- </i>its “more rigid structure”-- alongside its liquidity, there is its solidity-- alongside its “free movement” or <i>play</i>--- there is the Form of The Game. In the case of a computer game, the strict form is the <i>software object, </i>including all of its outputs and inputs and internal machinations, but not including the player (only the PlayerObject). In the case of a non-digital game, sports especially, the Form can be more difficult to define, encompassing <i>essentially </i>both rules and bodies, abstractions and raw materials. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">In the past, I’ve claimed that <i>games are music</i>. I’ve not changed my mind about this, but I’ve changed the focus for the time being, the approach to asking <i>how are games music? </i>or <i>how are games games? </i>What is the nature of this formalism which is not so much <i>anti-formal</i> but is rather trying to describe a different (and I think more accurate) formal ground, which may resembles anarchy to defenders of the existing ground? </span></div>
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<span class="s1">The Form of Games is dualistic-- Economic and Ecological, the one dealing with rules which can be broken and changed abstractly, the other dealing with forces which cannot be broken and which can only be changed by concretely reconfiguring the materials conditions which cause them. This is the ground, not goals or optima or anything else-- those are economic categories.</span><br />
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<span class="s1">The two "Eco" disciplines must be recognized and synthesized into a whole, with economics via game theory allowed to serve as connective tissue to political economy, and ecology via Eco-psych allowed to serve as bridge to the Earth sciences and aesthetics and natural philosophy as a whole. </span>The political aspect of games, far from relying on narrative representations of political themes, exists innately in the ‘micro-ecologonomic’ relations of the game machine to the player, the feelings, tasks, duties, considered as affordance and as labor, or if we are lucky-- as play. Work and play are not <i>quantitatively</i> different, both are simply-- <i>motion</i>. The <i>player</i> is a worker. Thermodynamic work is <a href="http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun">thermodynamic play</a>.‘Marcro-ecologonomic’ relations of player and game materials to the Earth follow, properly called ‘ecological economics,’ an approach which understands living things, non-human flora/fauna and human laborers both, to be essential to the play of the global economy, and only able to be reduced to commodity form (Land, Laborer) in what must be read essentially as an act of violence.</div>
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<span class="s1">Lana Polansky wrote during the most recent games-formalism debacle <a href="https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/561605282510278657">“if your critical analysis for some reason absents structures of power: YOU SUCK AS A FORMALIST”</a> My approach here does indeed suspiciously overlook structures of power for the time being. However, the bridges from economics and ecology to power are manifold, and I hope the absence can be felt not as a vacuum but as a ghostly <i>haunting</i> during this reading, making its absence felt between every line. <i>Force </i>and <i>Rule, </i>for instance, mean something very different, and often troubling indeed in the context of explicit class/privilege/political power dynamics than they do when merely describing the mechanics of football . These questions of power are already being explored beautifully by Polansky, Cameron Kunzelman, and others. </span><span class="s1">As a small contribution, I would hope that the notion of Power could be used to describe the most ordinary, gentlest possible interactions between things in addition to bigger political questions. </span><span class="s1">There is some enchanting ecological thinking in Plato's Eleatic stranger who says: </span>“My notion would be, that anything which possesses any sort of power to affect another, or to be affected by another, if only for a single moment, however trifling the cause and however slight the effect, has real existence; and I hold that the definition of being is simply power.” (from The Sophist). Affect and affordance are closely related. Ground and power. And in John Coltrane's <i>Love Supreme</i> poem: "One thought can produce millions of vibrations and they all go back to God... everything does [...] His way... it is so lovely... it is gracious.It is merciful--Thank you God."<br />
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For the purpose of thinking of games as explicitly political creatures as well as for simply trying to come to terms with some of their most basic and apparently vacuous (but merciful!) qualities, like the <i>feel</i> of something,. the jump height which Andi McClure brings up in the above-linked quote from Polansky, I hope this approach might prove useful as one means of conceptualizing any number of other ‘cousin’ concepts in the eco-family considered vis a vis a dry and formal approach to games, from very big to very small.<br />
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<span class="s1">This is all premised on the formal axiom that there are two and only two sorts of structural invariants which define the form of any given playspace. <i>This dualism cannot be stressed enough. </i></span></div>
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<span class="s1">The first kind of invariant, <i>rules</i>, constitutes what is in effect an abstract legal system that play must abide by if it is to be considered lawful. It is against the rules to run while holding the ball in basketball. It is against the rules to perform a ‘Eb’ in an orchestral performance when an E is written. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Rules can be broken.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The second kind of invariant, which I’ll begin by calling <i>forces</i>, compose a system of material-energetic tendencies which are fully actual and not abstract. They cannot be broken. In basketball, and in so many games, the <i>ground</i> is an example of such a force. If the court were <i>made of jelly</i>, the game rules would be unplayable, because dribbling would be impossible. If you are playing the flute, you will not be able to perform authentically one of Cage’s pieces for prepared piano. <i>Hatha </i>yoga is the yoga of bodily exertion, and <i>hatha </i>means force. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Forces<i> cannot</i> be broken-- (their causes can, however, be <i>exploited</i>, and <i>changed</i>, which we will go into shortly).</span></div>
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<span class="s1">(I am not using <i>force</i> in the sense it has in physics, which I don’t understand enough to use. I hope the intuitive usage is clear, and that it becomes clearer as we go along). </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Some formal definitions of games, like those proposed in Keith Burgun’s model, which develops a strict line of ‘game-essentialist’ thinking with good clear consistency, consider it necessary that the first type of structure, Rules, be present in a form in order for that form to be be called a game. Burgun defines a game as a ‘contest of decision-making’. <span class="s2"><a href="http://keithburgun.net/interactive-forms/">http://keithburgun.net/interactive-forms/</a></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1">This model says-- if only <i>forces</i> are present <i>without rules</i>, then the form under consideration is not a game, it is a ‘bare interactive system’ or a <i>toy</i>.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">This is a very good model to analyze, say, a game of chess, which indeed, is composed of many rules, which players are meant to keep <i>in mind</i>, and utilizes forces in only a few trivial ways (holding pieces to the board, different shapes to differentiate use-values of different pieces, different colors to differentiate teams, etc). Indeed, board games in general are largely amenable to a rules-analysis framework, and so an ontology of games which is rooted in board game history rather than, say, painting or swimming, is apt to emphasize rules at the expense of physical forces.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">But run-time computer games, considered as active materials, are composed solely of <i>forces</i> and <i>not rules</i>. </span><br />
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<span class="s1">Before a game is compiled, when code is still being composed with as a raw material, the designer is subject to the law of the programming language <i>as rule</i>, and indeed can within this legal system change the rules of her game with simple abstract commands, sufficing that they are accepted by the programming language as legal.</span><br />
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<span class="s1">But once the game is compiled and running, what was abstract becomes fully concrete, a <i>force</i> which cannot be changed but only redirected. </span><span class="s1">It is enough merely to recognize that we can do whatever we please with a computer game, it is not our ‘ruler’ (as much as it may try to be). The 'win/lose' psychological prod is an illusion with computer games. </span>We need not ‘believe’ we have lost if it tells us we have, we can <i>enjoy</i> the lose-screen as an aesthetic moment, we can seek it even (as I used to do playing Mario Kart, to turn into a bomb)-- when we have ostensibly 'losy', we have instead merely encountered a bifurcation in the system, a simple breaking point between two possible values of which one is not intrinsically better than the other. The only time a computer game becomes a ‘game’ in the strict sense like chess, where <i>winning </i>is certainly the right thing to strive for, is when we allow it to because we want to, because we find that rule beautiful, or (oftener, in my case) when a social community imposes this understanding of the form on us. </div>
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<span class="s1">In other words, computer games as objects, decoupled from their players, and considered in light of the strict game-essentialist formalisms, are not games proper, but are merely toys. This is equally true of <i>Civilization</i> and <i>Electroplankton</i>.</span></div>
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They are rules transmuted to force. Formal games made to sing to the sense experience of our animal selves.<br />
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<span class="s1">It is useful to nitpick about the form in this way, because <i>strict categories with predictive empirical validity are useful, </i>and as long as we are calling computer games 'games' in the classically strict sense of the word, we are being unscientific, and not very strict.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">It is my present conviction that this is not a matter of subjective opinion. There are more and less valid ways of analyzing these materials. </span><br />
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<span class="s1">The goal is to produce a <i>realistic </i>account of the form. A <i>Ludic realism </i>which asks what games are, and <i>how</i> particular games (or <i>classes of games</i> in the case of computer games) are games.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i>Ludic, </i>as I'm using it, means not only the stricter economic meaning of 'game' but also the looser form of 'play' broadly. English is somewhat unique in separating the concepts <i>game </i>and <i>play</i> .... <i>Spiel</i> is a German word signifying both.. Do you know other examples? A linguistic study along these lines would be interesting, maybe has been done, maybe I am missing something big... </span><br />
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In any case, the insistence on there being a major difference between a 'game' and a 'played form'-- we might call this insistence the "Washington consensus" of game definitions, paralleling as it does the economic policy going by that name inasmuch as it prematurely declares consensus before all participants have agreed to the plan.</div>
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Ludic realisms seek a global or even universal consensus. <i>Ludic Realism </i>is a doctrine that insists that the concept of <i>games</i> and <i>play</i> must be made to scale and to pan, to be <i>inclusive</i> of all the senses in which these words are used, and to develop an ontology appropriate to that breadth, to acknowledge that there is a vast plurality of different forms of games, and that we may not <i>get</i> them all..</div>
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<span class="s1">The Hindu <i>Lila</i> which considers play to be a divine ground of the universe, is an example of a ludic realism. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">So is the language of The Great Game used by Rudyard Kipling to describe the play of British Colonial forces dominating India and its neighbors in the late 19th century. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">So is this quotation from Elizabeth Warren’s recent book: “America’s middle class is under attack. Worse, it’s not under attack by some unstoppable force of nature. It’s in trouble because the game is deliberately rigged.” </span></div>
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<span class="s1">These are different sorts of games-- Lila being a game of <i>everything</i>; Kipling’s being a game of war; and Warren’s being a game of finance and neoliberal policy-- however, they all have in common the quality of being games that participants are not <i>voluntarily</i> choosing to play for fun, rather being games that involve <i>involuntary</i> participation on the part of players. Many games are games we do not choose to play; likewise, many things we choose to play which we do not necessarily think of as games. </span><br />
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<span class="s1">When Mattie Brice writes "i want to fuck the world when coffee at an unspeakable hour is fucking. when picking out a dress is fucking. when having sex isn’t the only way to fuck. jogging together is fucking. discussing your mistakes is fucking [...] i want to fuck the world when <b>explicit consent</b> isn’t just for sex but every type of relation," (<i>emphasis mine, </i><a href="http://www.mattiebrice.com/queer-as-in-fuck-me-a-design-manifesto/">link</a>) she is rightly celebrating both the voluntary/consensual as well as the radically open-form aspect of games(or 'fucking'), which makes them <i>good</i>-- but there are <i>evil </i>games, too, and these do not wait for consent, and we are drowning in them and drowning others in them every day.</span><br />
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<span class="s1">We ought to enjoy cultivating an understanding of <i>games</i> and <i>play </i>that allows for inclusion of the most distant, expansive, and even oft-ignored but common-sensical usages of those terms, games played without consciously recognizing them as games.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
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<span class="s1">Consider the efficacy of the classic game-essentialist formalism in light of this goal of ludic realism:</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
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<span class="s1"><i>If only forces are present without rules, the form being considered is not a game, it is a ‘bare interactive system’ or a toy.</i></span></div>
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<br />
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<span class="s1">It follows from this ontology that the Earth is a toy, that our body is a toy.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
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<span class="s1">But these are not toys! We are <i>lives</i> ! <i>Players (Games) </i>!</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: x-large;">3.</span></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zvHuvRxm-Kg/VT61fGg7CmI/AAAAAAAAAvY/ndzWceP8Abw/s1600/burgun-oikos.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zvHuvRxm-Kg/VT61fGg7CmI/AAAAAAAAAvY/ndzWceP8Abw/s1600/burgun-oikos.png" height="400" width="335" /></a></div>
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<span class="s1">The Toy / Game language is inadequate. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">There are better words on hand to signify the dualism of playspace-Form which has been roughly described.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
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<span class="s1">These are <i>economy </i>and <i>ecology</i>.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">What has been lately called ‘ludo-centric’ thinking (<a href="https://storify.com/landonscribbles/ludocentrism-in-games"><span class="s2">https://storify.com/landonscribbles/ludocentrism-in-games</span></a>) is nothing more than amateur <i>game theoretical </i>analysis. Game theory can be considered alternately a branch of pure mathematics and/or an economic (pseudo-)science. It is a legitimate branch of pure mathematics because the forms it deals with are Real (at least arguably so) in the geometric-Platonic sense. It is a pseudo-science, because it is (patently) inadequate as a predictive tool, supposing as it does that all economic actors are rational agents.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
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<span class="s1">Besides, whatever ‘purity’ game theory might have as a discipline of pure maths, it was indeed formulated as a practical tool-- described by Von Neumann and Morgenstern as “the proper instrument with which to develop a theory of economic behavior,” -- </span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
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<span class="s1">And thus we are not stretching definitions to call the kind of thinking which deals with rules and goals (a goal being nothing more than a Big Rule as to which <i>end</i> following a cascade of bifurcations is to be felt as most desirable)-- <i>economic thinking</i>. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
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<span class="s1">In many ways economic form deals with those components of a playspace which have no actual existence outside of rational player psychology. It is abstract and subjective. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Ecological form, on the other hand, is real in a physical sense-- it is independent of player psychology, it is concrete and objective, it is actual. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1">When there are <i>scarce resources</i>, ecological form can begin to take on qualities of economic form, and from this scarcity we derive the idea of e.g. evolution as an economic process as well as the <i>poetic economy </i>of making, for instance, a haiku fit the 5/7/5 pattern. This is a very interesting space in which the two concepts become intimately interwoven. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
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<span class="s1">In terms of the interface between player and space, ecological form demands something other than game theory’s rational agent models-- what it demands is in my view largely satisfied by the <i>ecological</i> <i>psychology</i> pioneered by James & Eleanor Gibson, developed by others, which is the source of the concept <i>affordance</i>, amongst other things. </span>James Gibson’s book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception outlines this concept in chapter 8 “The Theory of Affordances”: </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">“The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complimentarity of the animal and the environment....</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">Let us consider the affordances of the medium, of substances, of surfaces and their layout, of objects, of animals and persons .... Air affords breathing, more exactly, respiration. It also affords unimpeded locomotion to the ground, which affords support. When illuminated and fog-free, it affords visual perception. It also affords the perception of vibratory events by means of sound fields and the perception of volatile sources by means of odor fields. The airspaces between obstacles and objects are the paths and the places where the behavior occurs .... Water is more substantial than air and always has a surface with air ... It does not afford respiration for us. It affords drinking. Being fluid, it affords pouring from a container. Being a solvent, it affords washing and bathing. Its surface does not afford support for large animals with dense tissues .... Solid substances, more substantial than water</span></blockquote>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><i>Economic thinking </i>is the more suitable tool for analyzing a game of chess, whereas <i>ecological thinking</i> is the more suitable tool for analyzing something like mud-wrestling with a dog, or playing with a vaseline-lubricated watermelon in a swimming pool-- also, for analyzing the <i>ground</i> of computer games, once the concept of <i>affordances</i> has been hooked into <a href="http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf">Turing’s description of the <i>c-</i>machine,</a> it is possible to define ‘interaction’ in a way which is objective and not subjective.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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At the very beginning of section 2, <i>definitions</i>:</div>
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<span class="s1"></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: x-small;">“If at each stage the motion of a machine (in the sense of § 1) is completely determined by the configuration, we shall call the machine an "automatic machine" (or a-machine). .For some purposes we might use machines (choice machines or c-machines) whose motion is only partially determined by the configuration (hence the use of the word "possible" in §1). When such a machine reaches one of these ambiguous configurations, it cannot go on until some arbitrary choice has been made by an external operator. This would be the case if we were using machines to deal with axiomatic systems. In this paper I deal only with automatic machines, and will therefore often omit the prefix a-.”</span></span></blockquote>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Interaction is not so fuzzy a concept, this is what is meant. It is a free variable <i>x </i>which is afforded to the 'touch' or 'choice' of a player.</span><br />
<span class="s1"><br /></span>
<br /></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: x-large;">4.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://foreverloyal.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/children_s_play_house1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="311" src="https://foreverloyal.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/children_s_play_house1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span class="s1">It is convenient that <i>ecology </i>and <i>economy</i> have a shared root in <i>eco</i>- </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">The etymology reveals a lot and in a way which harmonizes quite beautifully with this dualism.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
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<span class="s1">Eco comes from the Greek <i>οἶκος</i>, meaning <i>household</i>. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">“Playing house” becomes the new prototypical game.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Economy comes from Eco + <i>nomos</i>, meaning <i>management</i>, <i>law</i>, or <i>Rule</i>. Economy means “Rule of the household.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Ecology comes from Eco + <i>logos</i>, meaning <i>ground, word, reason, order</i>.. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Indeed, in a game of Basketball, its system of <i>rules</i> is its economic component and the bounce of muscles and balls against the <i>ground</i> is among its most significant ecological components.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: x-large;">5.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://wonderfulbuddha.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/bodyofearth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="247" src="https://wonderfulbuddha.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/bodyofearth.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span class="s1">In economics, we hear of macro-economics, and micro-economics. </span><br />
<span class="s1"><br /></span>
<span class="s1">Game theory is a model of micro-econonmics, concerning as it does the behavior of individuals, its fabled rational agents. The flux of global financial markets is an example of the sorts of things macro-economics deals with. The two, of course, are related.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">For the purpose of our <i>ludic ecologonomy</i>, consider-- </span><br />
<span class="s1"><br /></span>
<span class="s1">that micro-ecologonomics are BODY-centric, </span><br />
<span class="s1"><br /></span>
<span class="s1">whereas macro-ecologonomics are EARTH-centric. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><i>Micro-ecologonomics</i> are the manifestation of ecologonomic form, from the point of view of an individual body in general, and in our first-person experience of the environment, in particular. </span>The study of computer games is a sub-field of micro-ecologonomics, concerned with the environmental relation between our body and machine and the software running on that machine. Stuart Kaufmann’s “candidate fourth laws of thermodynamics” as described in his book <i>Investigations</i>, are micro-ecologonomic concepts, concerning as they do the play of what he calls ‘natural games.’ His concept of movement toward <i>adjacent possibility</i> which <i>maximizes its dimensionality</i> to reach <i>the edge of chaos</i> is a striking model of not only evolution and other biological phenomena, as he intends it, but also, of game in general, games which are not limited to be game theoretical games, but which are rather the sort that dogs might play in the mud.</div>
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<span class="s1"></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><i>Macroecologonomics</i> is the study of global ecological effects, e.g. climate change, in relation to the global economy. The game of geopolitics, <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=trans-pacific+partnership">new trade deals</a> , the upcoming attempt to negotiate a treaty in Paris, etc. </span><br />
<br />
The field of ‘ecological economics’ is destined to deal with the specifics of the macroscopic with far infinitely greater nuance and efficiency than ludic ecolologonomics. Still, it is not a properly <i>different </i>field from the analysis of games that you are likely interested in if you are reading this-- it is not <i>alien</i> to the study of games, it is right at home, it belongs here, in the household.<br />
<br />
It is my hope that a 'microecologonomic' study of computer games might aid in tuning into microeconomies/ecologies in general, and that tuning into these might aid in cultivating an interest in the bigger problems. More on this soon.....</div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: x-large;">6.</span></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hlObtSN8urw/VT8Oirk2aUI/AAAAAAAAAvo/-RRXWtF2znw/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-04-27%2Bat%2B9.37.03%2BPM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hlObtSN8urw/VT8Oirk2aUI/AAAAAAAAAvo/-RRXWtF2znw/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-04-27%2Bat%2B9.37.03%2BPM.png" height="640" width="264" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span class="s1">I’ve got a work-in-progress draft of a much longer essay on this topic, and if you’d like to dive into that, it’s here: </span><span style="color: #0000ee;"><u>https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/35767605/Ecologonomy%20Jan%2010%202015.pdf</u></span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br />
I don't know if I'll return to it, or just move on, probably the latter!<br />
<br />
I'm not so much in the mood to write these days, I might try out some shorter posts to expand the thinking here. I'm not too good at economizing my style, tho... keeping it from tl:dr<br />
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David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-31568914191121903012014-01-27T16:05:00.001-08:002014-01-27T16:05:30.898-08:00Infinite Sketchpad / I Am A Strange Loop<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<b style="font-size: xx-large;"><i>I.</i></b></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><i><span style="font-size: large;">"The Emerald Tablet of Hermes"</span></i></b><br />
<b><i><span style="font-size: large;">(Newton Translation)</span></i></b><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div>
</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/84636921" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe>
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<i style="font-size: xx-large;">~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ </i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>II.</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; color: #333333; font-family: 'Open Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">∞</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 18px;">✎</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 18px;"> </span></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7_7KDCAPbWI/Uua-v-tfoCI/AAAAAAAAAps/l2ICF8mGdXI/s1600/Ouroboros-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7_7KDCAPbWI/Uua-v-tfoCI/AAAAAAAAAps/l2ICF8mGdXI/s1600/Ouroboros-1.png" height="286" width="320" /></a></div>
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In late 2012, I was introduced to Tom Lieber's <i>Infinite Sketchpad</i> (<i>many</i> thanks to Luke Iannini & Mike Rotondo for this!)-- it almost straight-away became one of my very favorite videogames & still is-- </div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p2" style="text-align: center;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Get <i>Infinite Sketchpad</i> (<span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; color: #333333; font-family: 'Open Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px; text-align: start;">∞</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 18px;">✎) </span>for iPad <a href="http://infinite-sketchpad.com/">HERE</a>. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p2" style="text-align: center;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Get David Johnston's <i>Infinite Doodle</i> for Windows/XBOX <a href="http://www.smudgedcat.com/blog/?p=7">HERE</a></div>
<div class="p3" style="text-align: center;">
(very different touch/movement/speed (fast!); mostly same space)<br />
<br />
See my drawings <a href="http://infinitesketches.tumblr.com/">HERE</a>.<br />
<br /></div>
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The <span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; color: #333333; font-family: 'Open Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">∞</span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 18px;">✎</span></span> space is a visualized Real Number XY Continuum, or 'blank fractal canvas' (the real-number line is a fractal, too, only one of trivial visual interest until we start to fill it in with content). It is a model of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes">Zeno's Playground</a>, that 'flux/motion-disproving' space famously played by Achilles and the Tortoise in defense of Parmenides' eternal/timeless Sphere. "The Continuum Problem" has historically given rise to some huge moments in the history of maths-- from Leibniz/Newton's Calculus, and when re-problematized, to Cantor's Set Theory, and more recently, building from this, as the assumed 'monstrous grain' of the <i>strange</i> infinitely detailed <i>fractal sets</i> described by Mandelbrot's free-scaling geometry.<br />
<br />
But none of this history need come up while playing. As described above, <i>Infinite Sketchpad</i> sounds like an esoteric tool, accessible only to mathematician-initiates, opaque to everyone else-- this isn't right, though. In actuality, it's probably much more suited to please the changing whims of irrationalists, luddites, non-gamers than the structured pursuits of formalists... All the <i>ideas</i> are FELT as <i>wonder</i>, it's all,play-- requiring no systems thinking, little design. Just wandering... It is <i>immediate</i>. You need only to play it yourself to meet this quality, its personality, it doesn't require any theory, it barely requires any gaming 'literacy' (drawing-literacy & ipad zooming being the closest it comes).<br />
<br />
For my part, it was basically the only videogame that I touched for almost a year...When I first played, I knew very little about the formal concepts of <i>infinities, </i>etc. that composed its conceptual/functional-material-grain, but it was clear that they were there, and it was easy enough to smell out a Borgesian canon-labyrinth of thought surrounding the mechanics and pictures as gradual intuitive understanding developed. It was exciting <i>not knowing</i> (not being able to formulate) things about the space, but still <i>playing</i> it, and coming to <i>know</i> it in a different sense, a <i>non-explicit (non-propositional) </i>kind of knowing/p-o-v.<br />
<br />
I started writing notes for a blog-post on it to share my excitement, and soon it grew out of control...<br />
<br />
The form is telling-- in the same way that infinite sketchpad allows us to zoom in and out and pan as much as we'd like, the 'blog-post' balloon-zooms in/out/across accordingly, and the ballooning very soon is too much to handle, especially once I start supplementing the canvas-play with external research (which feels <i>necessary</i> from very early on, given the historical-conceptual contexts of the ideas I.S. touches on)… I am learning to compose pictures within this new sort of space, and am writing at the same time-- the sensory-material potentials of the former process are informing the abstract-structural-linguistic potentials of the latter… There is the 'drawing plane' and the 'reading/writing plane' and the project becomes a a matter of seeking and describing a continuity or consistency between the two planes (and between these & the many other planes which are likewise touched).</div>
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<i><br /></i>
<i>Finishing</i> the essay becomes a <i>GOAL</i>. When I set out, all I wanted to do was write a little critique of the game, but I kept finding all of this <i>context</i> that the critique seemed to require if it was to be meaningful in the sense that I had felt it to be during my initial encounter.<br />
<br />
This goal is still unmet, incomplete. Every time I go through to edit, I want to add more, and when I add more, it's a mess, and I need to edit. There are 'subtractive' and 'additive' methods of composition, and though I've submitted myself at times during this process to both, the <i>growth</i> in its size is proof enough that the latter was a dominant controlling influence. After all, I never really 'delete' things in an <i>Infinite Sketchpad</i> picture. There's always more room! Games teach us how to play within their own frameworks <i>and we carry these 'ways' over to Other games,books,things,life,etc. </i>Living with <i>Infinite Sketchpad </i>cultivated in me a pathological <i>burrowing</i> aesthetic of sorts. This aesthetic seems to have occupied <i>in feeling & intention</i> many similar spaces to those that the 'pathological curves' (proto-fractals, monsters) of the 19th century occupied <i>in mathematical form</i>. </div>
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Needless to say, writing & drawing has felt something like the beginnings of a potentially infinite project, paralleling the structure of the game.. Fully submerging myself in that process for even another month is not something I'm interested in giving myself over to, as the endless tunnel of research has proven to keep me from other interests and work and from the joy of completing small projects. I was not prepared for the gravity what I embarked on, and though I'm very happy with the time I've spent on it, it's time to PAUSE or ESC the game for the time being (hopefully to return to finish the final chapter, at least, but we'll see...).</div>
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I've loosely tightened the essay up these last weeks, clipped off (some) rough ends, and have made it available as a first complete draft, which may or may not be a final draft, depending on how I'm feeling in the future:<br />
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>III.<br />Structure & Alchemy in</i></b></span><br />
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These essays are personal notes, a year or so of what might have served as Content on this blog, hoarded, cut, and re-composed in a single document instead. I have tried to be as truthful as possible. I have sampled many sources, some uncredited, usually on account of lazy book-keeping. Any of the writing's formal integrity is thanks to the bevy of samples of Pseudo-Hermes Huvanistagg-Ludistagg's work, an old ludic realist-materialist who I've given primary authorial credit to, though the less refined passages throughout are always my own…. Pseudo-Hermes is presumably named after Hermes Trisgmegistus, the first alchemist (with P.H. adopting the medieval scholastic naming convention, a la Pseudo-Dionysus, Pseudo-Aristotle, et al). The essay's historical ambitions, guided by P.H.H.L's alternate 'play canon', plateau at a still massively underdeveloped reevaluation of the epoch which immediately preceded our own 'scientific modernity'-- one in which Galileo, Newton, etc must be revisited & re-considered just as much as practitioners of intuitive magics (<i>alchemy, astrology, qabbalah, </i>etc.), as practitioners of the strict 'rationalism' we know them for today. At this pre-modern moment, the <i>object</i> of scientific inquiry is not separate from the <i>subject</i> of personal inquiry, feeling, affect-- <i>speculative interest</i>.. this is the meaning of magic.. It is my belief that videogames are irreducibly<i> pseudoscientific, </i>being composed of such subject-object dissolves,<i> </i>and that failing to account for their status as such will only serve to cut off those speculative possibilities best prepared to <i>advance</i> the medium. Hermes is a <i>line</i> back to the time and ethos of the <i>protosciences </i>('pseudoscience' was first used to refer to alchemy)-- the <i>conditions of modern science</i> -- the <i>primordial soup </i>from which the functions and concepts of which we are so proud and confident were given their first breath of life. Modern science, proud as it is, must give due thanks-- it did not birth itself but is rather a child of the magicians.</div>
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I can't say any longer that the essay's purpose is simply to celebrate/critique <i>Infinite Sketchpad</i> (though I hope it opens a way of thinking that could be more readily excited by the possibilities that I.S. presents). Instead, while <i>Infinite Sketchpad</i> serves as a materialized (vibrating) <i>model</i> of the spaces discussed throughout, the topic of the essay has rather undergone a massive zoom-out to the point of being concerned with the infinite macrocosmic canvas of Games as a Whole, their <i>playings</i> microcosmically represented by 'paths' walked through infinite sketchpad-- infinitely scalable approaches to the questions of what games are, what they've always been, what they might be… these are the 'boring' questions of last year, 'What are game?' etc, but the <i>battle</i> over the <i>use</i> of these terms is by no means complete.. The relations between gamefulness and artfulness and playfulness are by no means well understood, and the prophetic power of the <i>notgames</i> idea has not at all been exhausted. Notgames have their formal structures, too, and I am interested in exploring them. Why? <i>I often do not enjoy games that present me with an explicit goal</i>. I like to <i>wander</i> with whatever it is I am doing, to <i>shift</i> the goal. I like to <i>lose</i> if this allows me to shift-- I like even to spoil a game for others, to <i>grief,</i> for this same reason (I apologize!). I have on many occasions found <i>looking at a picture</i> to be a better Game than most videogames. For me, games are all about <i>touching</i>, affecting, but the eyes can touch, too. </div>
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The essay has become an anti-formalist formalism in a way, an attempt to defend the irrational, the inconsistent as manifest in games-without-goals (which really have <i>many</i> goals rather than none), and in the sensuous/haptic aspects of games, which some are inclined to consider 'less intelligent', but which are rather simply <i>irrational</i> in something very much like the numerical sense, in that these are the games that exist <i>between</i> the members of the infinitesimal series of rational numbers/rational games, which condition our reality at every moment even as we 'hop' from one rational game to the next (as we lose, grief, etc.).… This is to say that it is possible to play <i>even</i> a rational game irrationally (as is the nature of 'non-optimal' play). <i>This capacity</i> of the player is what I am most interested in, which puts me at odds with the conventional computer game-formalisms, from what I understand. I'd been calling <i>Infinite Sketchpad</i> a game, and I still do, but it can be considered as such only if <i>irrational games</i> are allowed to exist. Needless to say, the Pythagoreans <i>were not pleased</i> by Hippasus' discovery of irrational numbers, and despite a handful of exceptions to the contrary, it seems that the mechanisms of Game Culture are not liable to be pleased by an insistence of the <i>material primacy</i> of irrational games, or by the corresponding principles of <i>ludic realism</i> that parallel the pathological realism of the Real number continuum--<br />
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That there are indeed infinitely many rational games, but that in between each of these games, <i>there are infinitely MORE games which are irrational. </i>That <i>almost all games are irrational. </i><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>IV.</i></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>V.</i></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>8 Theses on </i></b></span><span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; color: #333333; font-family: 'Open Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">∞</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 18px;">✎</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; line-height: 18px;"> </span></span><br />
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<i>Since I realize that very few readers will click through to read more than a few pages of the essay and that fewer still will read the whole, AND since even in its finished state the essay gets carried away with itself and the applications of infinite sketchpad gets lost in the mess of things…-- I'd like to present just a few numbered theses here which are directly related to the game itself, not drifting away from it so much as the essay does, but rather summarizing some of the key ideas that I have arrived at while playing/writing, as a standalone mini-essay and preview of the larger project. </i></blockquote>
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<i>The full essay is a piece of 'game criticism' on Infinite Sketchpad only by an analogical leap/stretch of the imagination-- the below points more clearly so.</i></blockquote>
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<b>1. Properly acknowledging the nature of scaling relations in <i>Infinite Sketchpad </i>drawings warrants a re-evaluation of <i>fractals</i> such that the category is opened to include not only scaling objects generated by algorithms, but also scaling objects generated by a constant stream of <i>finite </i>PLAYED material actualities the sources (players) of which are <i>potentially non-computable</i>. Such an inclusion allows for the completion of Mandelbrot's <i>Naturalistic</i> project</b></div>
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The calculation of Mandelbrot's variable D, the <i>fractal dimension</i>, operates on the assumption that a scaling self-similarity will cascade into further detail infinitely, it supposes a wholly <i>abstract </i>image of space which does not fully correspond with out own. But this has not stopped Mandelbrot from applying this abstract model to concrete-finite actualities in nature, art etc. D is already famously applied to finite-natural pseudo-fractals like the British Coastline, which was not generated by an algorithm, but rather by the MATERIAL PLAY of waves, of tectonic movements, etc. His whole book <i>The Fractal Geometry of Nature</i>, is concerned with other non-algorithmic fractalish things which were <i>played</i> by nature, and then abstracted & modeled algorithmically. </blockquote>
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The fractal geometry of nature points the way toward a new class of proudly <i>finite</i> fractals. <i>Natural fractals are all finite</i>. What there is of the infinite is to be found <i>within</i> the finite. And insofar as an artwork can be considered an extension of nature (the player or artist and her environment is the system of waves shaping the shoreline), it only makes sense to apply Mandelbrot's mathematics to pictures such as these. Mandelbrot was already onto this idea, as his paper "Scaling and Scalebound structure: A useful distinction in the visual arts" can attest to. In <i>Infinite Skethpad, </i>we may not have <i>strict</i> self-similarity, depending on what the player chooses to draw, but <i>similarity </i>and <i>difference</i> are BROAD categories, and it ought to be possible to delineate scaling relations between, as it were, pattern and entropy, as regards <i>whatever</i> information we're presented with.</blockquote>
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<b>2. Infinite Sketchpad is both the most radical and most intuitive dimension-shifting game that has been made. [a] It is the most radical because it is concerned with <i>surfing a continuum of</i> <i>floating point/irrational dimensions, as opposed to 'snapping' between integer dimensions </i>(as per #2); [b] it is the most intuitive because it manages to <i>shift dimensionality</i> all while remaining a strict 'virtual parallelism' to the 2-dimensional material of the screen itself-</b></div>
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Charles Sirato's 1936 "Dimensionist Manifesto" might provide a fitting generic term for games of wonky shifting dimensionalities-- <i>Fez's </i>move from 2 to 3 to a different 2. <i>Miegakure's</i> move from 2.5(ish) to 4(ish) (ostensibly a movement from 3 to 4). Etc. <i>Braid </i>moving from 2-D space + 1-D time where time is one-directional, to 2-directional 3-D spacetime. </blockquote>
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If we follow the logic of the classic dimensionist book <i>Flatland</i>, in which a sphere penetrating the 2-D plane is perceived by locals as a a circle which grows from small (at contact) to large (at sphere mid-slice), then it would suggest that games in which <i>scaling objects</i> are prominent characters could likewise be considered 'dimensionist' games-- for instance, <i>Katamari Damacy, Scale</i> (forthcoming), <i>Within A Star-Filled Sky, Maquette, Gorgoa, Google Earth, etc</i>. Each of these games is a game of N-dimensions penetrated by objects of dimension N+1 projected downward onto the lower plane. </blockquote>
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<i>Infinite Sketchpad </i>is quite strange in that the spaces we draw in it are always effectively BETWEEN 2 and 3 dimensions-- but unlike the above-mentioned scaling games, I.S.'s spaces dimensionalities are in constant flux, the value of D is constantly changing-- e.g. 2.1, 2.2, 2.23, 2.8… Detail which doesn't tunnel into further detail is representative of the side of the continuum nearer D=2, while detail which tunnels <i>deeply</i> into further detail is representative of the side of the continuum nearer D=3. The fractal dimension <i>D</i> on this plane is always 2 < D < 3. The zoom characterizes the possibility and <i>actualization</i> of an infinite line on a finite plane such that the (2D) <i>surface</i> is effectively <i>becoming (limit 3D)</i> <i>volume</i>.</blockquote>
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<b>3. Following from its capacity to freely navigate the strange dimensional continuum <i>between </i>D=2 and D=3, something very much like Infinite Sketchpad will be an invaluable aid in prototyping any future-videogame ideas of sufficient free-scaling complexity.</b></div>
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If more games (software-spaces in general) are to made where objects contain entire spaces, and where spaces can be fully encapsulated as objects, and where there is to be a potentially infinite cascade of such zooms in and out-- <i>planning & playing</i> in a tool like <i>Infinite Sketchpad</i> will be essential. Such a tool can (and will) be amplified by new Forms of Life, no doubt, but the basic idea of freely composing a Great Chain of parts and wholes irrespective of an algorithmic top-down will prove powerful in the years to come, if the intuitive bottom-up is to be joined with the Universalizing potentials of speculative abstraction. </blockquote>
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<i>Infinite Sketchpad</i> allows such abstraction to be explored smoothly. Smooth like pen wandering on paper. Smooth like pressing into butter, or some other 'spreadable' sensitive substance. Smooth like <i>smooth functions</i>. Smoothness is <i>Realistic</i>. Continuity is realistic. This is part of why <i>Half-Life</i> is so beautiful. It is a continuous stream of synthetic consciousness, straight-up. You start on the tram, and everything follows from what precedes it without gaps, there are no substantial 'edges' to take into consideration. Life is continuous (save sleep, hypnosis, and other strange edge-states). To create a smooth scaling space where objects are always spaces and spaces are always objects is merely to take this principle of 3D spacetime realism and <i>amplify</i> it. The capacity for smoothness in a scaling space allows that part/whole object-relations need not be overly simplified-- it is possible to draw cascades of entangled objects in <i>Infinite Sketchpad</i> of the sort that it is difficult to say where one ends and where the other begins. Object-hyper-object-hyperhyperobject-hyjectperobbbb,he etc... The 'count as one' replaced, as often as possible, with the 'count as what?' (inconsistent multiplicity). </blockquote>
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<b>4. The depth of scale and the scaling <i>drift</i> required to 'visit' (in time) all of an <i>I.S.</i>-picture complicates the as-yet little interrogated 'edge' between videogames and <i>pictures</i>. Pictures in I.S. are undoubtedly pictures, but they also seem to be little <i>adventure</i> games, too, <i>explorations</i>, as deserving of that title as any other… Videogames and drawings/paintings/images-in-general must be considered as existing together on a continuum with their distinction characterized by a difference of degree, rather than one of kind.</b></div>
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These are <i>drawings</i>, but they are <i>shifting possibility spaces</i> (or games) just the same, in our experience and in their material constitution. Pictures, of course, have always been shifting possibility spaces in our experience, but a new <i>material</i> <i>principle of relativity</i> is introduced here, whereby the whole and parts are more distanced from one another than they have ever been.</blockquote>
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Following up on the implications of the picture-game continuum requires stepping outside of <i>Infinite Sketchpad</i>, and revisiting wholly 'static-flat' drawings with the new <i>sense of possibility</i> that I.S. has instilled in us. Now, there is a clear sense of <i>preparing to zoom into</i>, e.g. Kandinsky's free-scaling Compositions. Clumpings of details function as <i>attractors</i> for our attention. Our eye follows details, and enters new (faster) rhythmic spaces in those detail-basins which feature objects more densely packed together. Infinite Sketchpad <i>automates</i> the possibility of tunneling endlessly into such detail basins, allows K's Compositions to <i>unfold. </i>Paul Klee's <i>Notebook's</i> will be a good place to steal game mechanics from, once we are comfortable abandoning representational design in favor of pure <i>concreteness / synthetic-vibrational player-materiality</i>. </blockquote>
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<b>5. The <i>shift</i> of scale initiates <i>rhythmic-musical flows</i> as much as it does drifting-ludic<i> </i>flows, and thus infinite sketchpad must exist on a continuum with other <i>music objects</i> as much as it does on that with other <i>picture objects</i>.</b></div>
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There is no <i>sound</i> attached to these rhythms, so we are still dealing with strictly visual music. Rhythm exists even in classical pictures, but now there is a new physical time element (this, despite the 'static' form of the pictures), whereby the density of objects dispersed around a basin of attraction creates relative pulses, where higher density is faster, and lower density is slower. Size itself is rhythm.</blockquote>
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There are many scaling aspects in music. The classic example is a pulsing rhythm which, when sped up beyond a certain threshold, we begin to perceive as a tone. 2:1 is octave & boom-chick-boom-chick both. 3:2 is fifth and duple-triple polyrhythm. We can imagine (and maybe it has been done) a space which plays with e.g. duple-triple rhythms using tones that have been generating by speeding up this rhythm itself. And this is to list only the first 2 pitch-rhythm members of the harmonic series of integer relations, which continues scaling <i>up </i>(in frequency), <i>down</i> (in wavelength/time), etc… All of this is ancient-- there are more modern, computational devices, too-- Granular synthesis comes to mind. The shepard tone comes to mind. These & other musical-mechanical devices could be used to produce wildly dynamic soundtracks for new games which use free-scaling mechanics. And to this end, it will be as much a matter of developing a taste for these new sound-worlds as it will be one of actively <i>designing</i> with them. </blockquote>
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It is not clear exactly what the relation between scaling musics and scaling pictures might be, but the 'continuum' of musical form outlined in scaling<i> </i>theoretical works such as Adam Harper's <i>Infinite Music</i>, James Tenney's<i> Meta-Hodos</i>, Erik Christiansen's <i>The Musical Timespace</i>, Curtis Roads' <i>Microsounds</i> etc will be of great use in exploring the possibilities...</blockquote>
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<b>6. Infinite sketchpad's emergent relations between parts and wholes ties the 'problematic' of drawing/composing in an infinite space to some of the classical problems of metaphysics.</b></div>
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Metaphysics seems to deal with games played collaboratively by a relatively small list of 'conceptual personae', several of which are key 'mechanical personae' in Infinite Sketchpad-- Parts and Wholes, the One and the Many, Process & Object... These concepts are all unavoidable in any attempt to describe what something <i>is</i>, what it is <i>becoming</i>... (etc!). Metaphysics is a 'gateway drug' to mathematics. These Problems more or less all follow from the <i>play </i>of Zeno's paradox, the famous formulation of the "Problem of the Continuum", which is reducibly mathematical-technical in one sense, and irreducibly metaphysical in another. Is there <i>flux-becoming</i> or is the <i>form-being</i>? And <i>what</i> is the relation between such pairs? Leibniz' work on the 'labyrinth of the composition of the continuum' produced the infinitesimal calculus alongside Newton's. The continuum is a <i>labyrinth</i> precisely because no matter how much you divide and divide into infinity, you are still only producing <i>rational numbers</i>. Between each pair of infinitely small rational units, there are infinitely many <i>irrational numbers</i> which have still not been touched. These irrationals are the seat of the proper <i>smoothness </i>or <i>continuity</i> of the continuum. Calculus does not solve Zeno's paradox, it merely <i>asks</i> it again, and makes something useful from the question. Over a century later, Georg Cantor's study of irrational numbers develops into his transfinite theory of infinities (irrationals requiring infinite calculation to describe), which describes the split between countable-digital infinite (rationals) and the uncountable infinite (irrationals and beyond-- approaching--> Absolute/Inconsistent Infinite--God). These studies were also the beginning of his set theory (which is the count of a Many into a One). Meanwhile formal logic (non-electronic videogames) is being stratified by Frege, next Whitehead & Russell will attempt to map maths on logic onto one another and Gödel follows up eventually with his incompleteness theorem, with its discoveries surrounding <i>inconsistency</i> and this is Hofstadter's pet project, the Strange Loop, the tangled hierarchy, the part that contains the whole. This looping form, snake eating its tail, has also been called the Ouroboros by the alchemists. </blockquote>
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Inconsistency. Irrationality. Infinity. THESE mathematical qualities which are, at some value-limits, NOT computable-- the problem of the continuum sheds light on them, and Infinite Sketchpad sheds light on the problem of the continuum. </blockquote>
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I ran into this little bit from Raph Koster: "It may be that games are all about math. And I think that sucks." But this sort of sentiment is a shame! Why does this suck? The thinking, I imagine, is that if games are all about math, they can't be all about Art, but to hold to this is to think too little of math and art both. Freely allow mathematics to breathe metaphysics. Is it, has it ever been, anything more, or less? Attempting to allow a maximally intensified/living Art to coexist (become One with?) a maximally intensified/living Maths is <i>the most promising project of videogames</i>, as far as I'm concerned. A new kind of Hippasusian-Pythagorean approach is wanting, where we DO NOT think that it <i>sucks</i> for games to be all about math, because math is <i>not</i> regarded as over-rational reductionism but is rather, as it has always been, the formalization of the <i>players</i> of metaphysics itself, the One, the Many, the parts and the wholes, the rationals and irrationals, and their relations and inconsistencies-- the games that they play.</blockquote>
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<b>7. Building from #s 3-5, It follows that software structures ought to be thinkable as elements existing on a continuum which likewise contains metaphysical structures, musical structures, pictorial structures, etc. This is maybe something akin to what Deleuze calls the Virtual Continuum.</b></div>
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There exists some sort of vast N-dimensional Real continuum that can count <i>games, pictures, music, </i>and <i>philosophy</i> all together, each freely able to appropriate structural 'tactics' from the next. The way Herman Hesse described his imagined "Glass Bead Game" plays out similarly. And though this continuum counts the supreme <i>consistency</i> of software and its wholly rational numerical composition as part of its ranks, it reaches beyond the computable, too, touching the inconsistent, the irrational, the infinite-- this is no different from the Real number continuum itself! And this is the space (to descend fully into pseudo-science), between each of infinitesimals, which the language of the arts might operate in, such that the <i>meaning</i> of a picture, a game, a piece of music, a concept-- this meaning will both <i>touch</i> (being conditioned by) and be inconsistent with (being unbounded by) the information structures of software itself. </blockquote>
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<b>8. Since 'ideas' of some sort (Whitehead's 'eternal objects' reduced to structural consistencies) can exist as structure encoded <i>in</i> the computational material and outer flesh of the software as much as in our nervous system/human brain, and since it is possible to learn <i>from the software as teacher</i>, the relationship between mind, body, and world is immediately complicated, where each seems to be implicated in the next, where Mind can <i>and does</i> exist in the world just as much as in the body.</b></div>
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But this is not so simple as to say that <i>we ARE computers</i>. That thesis is up for grabs... this is rather to say that <i>we live WITH computers</i>. And that we <i>think with</i> and in many ways <i>are</i> what we live with. Tool-Being. Mind is <i>distributed across the environment.</i> </blockquote>
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"Radical embodied cognitive science" is probably the discipline these days which is doing the most to shed light on this point of view. It is, as it were, a borderline alchemical mix of eco-psychological behaviorism and cognitive representationalism via Merleau-Ponty body-phenomenology..</blockquote>
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This thesis that Mind exists dispersed throughout the whole environment, of course, can be applied across the board to any and all videogames, insofar as we enter the game and the game enters us, but I have found infinite sketchpad to be a particularly good example, partly because of the grandeur of the ideas which it touches on, and partly because I spent so much time following trails it seemed to lay out for me to learn from. I went to school <i>with this Mind..</i> </blockquote>
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In Jung's description of alchemy, the individual's Mind is 'projected into the materials' -- Radical embodied theories might allow for an understanding of such 'projections' that they are not ego-centric 'illusions,' but rather Real bonds of relation, World-Mind, connections in aesthetics and causality. </blockquote>
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The alchemist's Art of Memory (see Francis Yeates) does not discriminate between matter and memory. Matter outside the body is just descriptive of memory structures (RAM) as is matter inside the body is (Brain), . Memory, and mind in general, permeate the environment, chaos-cosmos. The contemporary obsession with Enlightenment materialism and its metaphysics which is at all times wholly reducible to quantified observation has proven itself powerful. But it did not <i>grow itself</i>. "In order to understand our situation today we must understand that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the educated section of wester Europe inherited the results of about five centuries of intense speculative activity" (Whitehead, <i>The Function of Reason</i>). The question-- do we proceed with this 'objectivity' that seems to have been <i>won</i> from the Game of the proto-sciences which culminated in the proud, modern discoveries and systems of Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, etc? Or do we go back and figure out <i>what games were played</i> for those five centuries that allowed the conditions of such <i>wins</i> to be possible in the first place. As happens again and again, the Problem loops back to the question of whether to prioritize the Object, or the Process. The revisitation of history will be an invaluable tool in reclaiming faith in a self-destabilizing <i>object-Idea</i> of irreducible Process itself.</blockquote>
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If <i>Infinite Sketchpad</i> is not composed of <i>some kind of Mental Stuff</i>, then it seems to me that whatever mental stuff actually <i>is</i> composed of perhaps ought not hold such a tight monopoly on the 'limits' of thought and experience as we are so often inclined to think.</blockquote>
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David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-2707414890072818062013-11-19T11:22:00.000-08:002013-11-19T11:22:33.211-08:00Music & Games as Shifting Possibility Spaces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I gave a talk last week in Montreal at MIGS, which followed this outline. The points I spoke about were more or less improvised within this framework/sequence, and I'm going to do the same thing with writing now, which is likely going to tunnel some ideas into a less conversational/more solipsistic hole, with things that i could write but might not say.... ohhh, etc.-- </div>
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in any case-- annotations follow each slide, hoping to clarify them-- in general, hoping to to share some useful <i>tactics</i>.</div>
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MUSIC = GAMES. My work with music designs, which is what I often call the work I've done in games, has more or less followed this assumption at every step. The belief, or working hypothesis, that there is an identity between music and games as played structure.. Or more accurately-- that it is possible to <i>construct</i> an image of such an identity, the discrete concepts (music, game) themselves being 'meaningless' before they are played in this or any other construction.<br />
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I. Trying to find the IMAGE of the music/game identity</div>
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II. Lessons learned from specific games.</div>
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III. Future directions for research</div>
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~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~<br />
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RULE-of-THUMB / DOGMA ~~~~~ This is KEY ! The precedence for this statement is pretty huge, from the Pythagorean musical-numerical cosmologies (which consider the scaling categories COSMIC music, HUMAN music, and INSTRUMENTAL music-- only the last of which we'd still call by that name), thru all the hermetic tendrils that have flowered out of them..</div>
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Adam Harper has written on this here (http://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2012/06/musical-radicalism-beyond-sonic-talk-at.html), and when the non-sonic image is kept in mind, the beautifully described 'progressive differentiation of Music Space' in his book <i>Infinite Music</i> starts to conceptually bind with the progressive differentiation of everything, more or less, a new Pythagoreanism for today, based on <i>difference</i> rather than identity? New geometries-- scale, paths, wiggles... Recalling some of the more old-fashioned understandings of what music is. Robert Fludd, old English alchemist, writes that:</div>
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<span class="s1">"Music is the knowledge by which all worldly things are joined by unbreakable bonds and by which like is related to like by equal proportion in any object. This definition fits <i>musica mundana</i>, <i>humana</i> and <i>instrumentalis"</i></span></blockquote>
I like this! That music is the <i>connective</i> tissue of things, the principle of <i>composition, assemblage</i> considered broadly. The ground of things, insofar as Aleister Crowley's equation 0=2 can be read as ground...<br />
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But even without going into cosmologies, the simple existence of musical scores puts our belief in the primacy of sound in music to question.<br />
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Old men who are into musical aesthetics are very concerned with <i>The Musical Work</i>, which is this more or less wholly computable string of information that we are given in the score^^. There's the <i>work</i> and the <i>performance</i>, which are tangled but discrete, and the Work somehow manages to exist independently of sound-- this, regardless of whether it's intended to eventually guide the production of sound or not.<br />
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Ballet, too, considered apart from its 'soundtrack.' simple dance choreography above. I remember hearing about John Cage / Merce Cunningham collaborations, and how they would often work on the sound & dance components independently and then just sit the pieces on top of one another, letting chance decide the audio-visual-haptic synchronicities, letting the musical connective-tissue just <i>happen</i>, being receptive to the mutual creation of juxtaposed parts, each already complete unto itself..<br />
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This is a painting of Wassily Kandinsky's. He was always quick to call his work music. ~ ~ In his theoretical writings (<i>Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Point and Line to Plane</i>) he regularly references the <i>sounds </i>of a picture, which are lo, hi, bright, dark, wet, dry, etc-- he was a famous <i>syntesthete</i> but it shouldn't be thought that he had a special capacity for the blending/dissolving of the senses that others aren't capable of. Instead, his work can function as a <i>teacher</i> for us-- i.e., PRACTICE: allow the line connecting our pupils to the picture to be the 'avatar' or 'player character' in the playspace. "Line of sight", "Line of attention", etc... Drift <i>intentionally</i>, from one spot to another, and feel the light-affects change as zone of the picture you are focused on comes in and out of focus. The matrix in the upper-left corner can be massaged with the eyes somewhat, like flicking fingers through the teeth of a comb-- brlrlrlrlrlrlr -- rhythms slowing down some as gaps between lines increase, speeding up as they close together-- maybe pitches changing likewise (faster rhythm = higher pitch, when <i>zoomed into</i>). Looking at other sections may feel totally different-- colors to me often feel more like harmonic zones, whereas lines feel like rhythmic contours. It is worth spending some GOOD TIME with these pictures, like the amount of time you might spend with a little flash game, and to drift through them and feel the music/affect of the different points and their interrelations (recalling Fludd's definition of music).<br />
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So, this is the music design TACTIC that the last hypothesis prepared the ground for. Just like we were starting to <i>read</i> Kandinsky's picture as a score, and just as we could do the same with dance notations-- it is possible to read ALL GAMES as dynamic scores already complete with the necessary time-structures, rhythmic information. The picture above is a clipping from the mario 64 manual, showing a handful of the core jump-mechanics. Anyone who has played can recall the different rhythms of different jumps. The triple jump, for example, where the rhythm is elastic-expansive, air time increasing with each additional hop.. Rhythm looks something like J - - , J - - - - , J - - - - - - - ..... Where "J" is for jump, and the dashes are airtime. It would be <i>possible</i> to create a spatialized notation of interactions in a game in this way, even if a bit absurd, as we would quickly require many more than the 2 dimensions that the page allows for, if we wanted to account not only for the time-structures of isolated interactions (which may often be accountable for using only 1 dimension, the <i>path</i> they follow), but also the more important <i>combinations</i> of mechanics that emerge in play, which will require a stacking N+1 dimensionality.<br />
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In any case, just based on the sequence of events and processes in a game and how these relate to the broader space of <i>all possible sequences</i> --from this, we are given the new 'meter' of game design, which has little to do with the evenly divided 4/4, 3/4 etc of much linear music-- rather, composed of metric 'downbeats' which are placed seemingly arbitrarily, by a kind of willful chance, the player's activity.<br />
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Music design takes this basic temporal architecture of <i>any game</i>, and 'hugs' it with a material-vibrational SKIN which is called the 'soundtrack.' This is just like a 'skin' for Winamp or whatever, in that it's at least in theory totally replacable -- the game organism can fully survive a skin graft without suffering any pain.<br />
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The skin needs to 'eat up' two concepts/disciplines to be counted as One -- sound design and composition. Musicality should exist in the the haptic-responsive aspects of the sound design as much as responsiveness/touch/immersion/nonlinearity should exist in the compositions.<br />
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TOUCH is the thread that holds these components together.<br />
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For this reason I add "game feel" to the list of things music design ought to be wholly tuned into. Game feel describes the concept of input-<i>microrhythm</i>, more or less, that Steve Swink has written about in his book. It is the game's time-architecture-- but zoomed in deep, where a whole rhythmic composition can unfold in 1 second or less-- how does the ground respond that is covered in honey? in ice? How quickly do we slide down a sticky wall in Knytt?<br />
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The game feel is like the musculature of the game-organism, which, being so close to the surface of the skin itself, makes itself known, haptic/visual, through the skin, and acts as a medium between the external world and the hidden internals, like the <i>skeletal frame</i>, which corresponds to the macro time-structures considered broadly<br />
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To treat ALL of these components musically can send us down a sometimes confusing path. We are trying to integrate the a meaningful aesthetic of both <b>pieces</b> of music and of <b>instruments</b> as if these were One Thing. Something that has beautiful sequence (regardless of the order of seqence) in addition to beautiful TOUCH/response.<br />
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Beautiful TOUCH has not been often acknowledged as one of the most important parts of music, because it is <i>always</i> tuned into from the PLAYER's perspective, much moreso than the listener's (even if listener-projection <i>into</i> the player is a very real thing). But the player knows well the importance of touch, and that, indeed, there are countless pieces of music that, while beautiful in their touch, for those involved in playing, did not seem so to the audience members who were not implicated in the causal source of the music in the same way (The opposite is also true-- beautiful sound-affects, ugly touch-- and this is <i>especially</i> true of much computer music today).<br />
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This is one of the greatest challenges of music design in light of musical developments considered broadly. To integrate an aesthetic of <i>immanent touch, </i>and necessarily <i>transformation</i>, into the existing aesthetics of progression, sequence, etc. Perhaps this is something that can <i>only</i> be done in videogames, or in other software spaces considered broadly. Spaces which, are they to become <i>compositions</i>, need to integrate something of the elastic-sequential aesthetics that videogames have really excelled at.<br />
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This is the question: can we come to terms with an understanding of instruments and compositions which are not at all describable in terms of a simple one-directional hierarchy?<br />
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As is the case today, instruments are used <i>in</i> compositions, and not the other way around. It is much more interesting, it seems, to ask <i>how</i> <i>compositions can be used in instruments</i>...<br />
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Scrubbing through samples is a basic way of practicing this idea today, that anyone can do. The <i>instrument</i> is the sample-space, which is the linear strip of information from the beginning of a piece to the end-- but the the instrument's haptic aspect is its capacity to move through this space, not in a straight line, but drifting from point to point, triggering events, new sequences, recombined as parts from the old dissolved whole. The material that is sampled is the <i>composition</i> that is used as a component part of the sampler-<i>instrument</i>.<br />
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Douglas Hofstadter's concept of the Strange Loop, or <i>tangled hierarchy, </i>is predated by the alchemical ouroboros (above^^), the snake eating its tail, and I believe this will prove to be a very powerful conceptual image we might want to consider carrying along with us to navigate these problems..<br />
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Once the strange loop is taken for granted, there need not be any difference between an instrument and a composition, because we will naturally assume that any instrument has its compositional aspect, its time-structures, and that any composition will have its instrumental aspect, its degrees of freedom, or haptic capacity to be <i>played<u>.</u></i><br />
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In the same way, then, we're looking to find an understanding in which music and games can likewise be considered as the same-- the strange loop "Games are a kind of music", and "musics are a kind of game"-- <i>always in motion/dialogue</i>, but being counted together in the loop, effectively functioning as one.<br />
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How?<br />
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Two spaces: music & games... imagine that they're totally discrete.<br />
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Even if we do this, it is impossible to ignore that they are both played, and it is hard not to be curious what is this PLAY that music and games have in common.<br />
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Some would say this-- that the shared use-word is deceptive-- that <i>playing music</i> and <i>playing games</i> mean totally different things.<br />
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& I <i>do</i> think there's something interesting to tunnel into here, namely the difference between <i>aesthetic play </i>with its unspoken Many goals which may converge into an unspoken One-- and <i>game play</i> with its explicitly spoken One goal, which may be partitioned & micromanaged in terms of a manageable Many...<br />
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But-- I don't think this is fundamental. Because I think many games are <i>playable</i> from the aesthetic point of view as much as the <i>gaming pov</i>, and that many pieces of music are likewise playable from the <i>gaming</i> point of view as much as from the aesthetic pov. Exploring these distinctions is for another time<br />
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It is enough to say that there is something that is <i>played</i> which is in common between the forms..<br />
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So, then, they are both to be regarded as PLAYSPACES, spaces where play happens...<br />
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Or, to be more descriptive-- as SHIFTING POSSIBILITY SPACES.<br />
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<i>Shifting Possibility Spaces</i> is my best attempt at describing the structural-<i>materiality</i> of this form that game spaces and music spaces are both part of ...<br />
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Playspace super-set (space of all possible playspaces??)<br />
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Shifting possibility spaces draw on the already very popular "possibility space" concept-- but whereas possibility spaces appear too often from the 'global' (designer) point of view, which deals with the Universal Set of the situation, or the "space of all possible _____ ", SPS can deal with the immediate sense of possibility at play in the environment.<br />
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A possibility space is fully <i>spatialized</i>. A <i>shifting possibility space</i> allows for the immanent flow of time to enter its description.<br />
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Meaning, it can begin to account for the <i>NOW</i> in the space-- the possibility space is ALWAYS an contingent thing, which is not describable from the outside-- which is immanent to our situation in the sapce, contingent on the flow of time, always destroying and recreating itself..<br />
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SHIFTING possibility spaces attempts to put TIME back into the possibility space idea, which is too often satisfying with mapping of time onto space ("time is just another dimension of the space").<br />
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That SPS will also spatialize time is a probably a necessity and almost certainly risk-- but to keep this in mind early on, the EXPERIENCE of time, local to the player's experience-- maybe we can avoid some of formalism's pitfalls, even as a new aspect of gamespacetime is given quantitative description.<br />
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So what does this immediate experience look like? Constantly changing, of course, but changing around <i>relatively fixed</i> grounds, which are the conventional mechanics/rules/boundaries/goals/virtualities that are used to describe structural possibility spaces as such. For instance, you probably have a wall near you right now, which would be difficult to break through, and for all intents and purposes, it is a fixed boundary, even though you could smash it if you got a sledgehammer or whatever..<br />
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A new way of describing these relatively fixed properties of a space may be in order, one which can account for game mechanics, rules, instrumental resistances, etc.. i've been attracted to some of the language in the chaos sciences of emergence/complexity/etc, which seems ripe for reappropriation in the context of PLAYSPACES (PLAY is the entropic elephant in the room in all of that, if you ask me..) .. attractors, topological invariants, phase transitions.... but im getting ahead of myself, just a quick mention if you're keen to follow clues and cruise down those avenues, from the <i>local POV </i>instead of the <i>global</i>...<br />
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It is interesting to try to 'map' the possibility space of a given day, which might start out as deciding whether to snooze the alarm or not, and then once out of bed, which branches in insane numbers of directions/dimensions..<br />
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What we find at each of these branches is an EVENT of <i>shifting possibility, </i>wherein new possibilties present themselves which we did not account for as possible prior to the transition. Beginning of Ocarina of Time, we are still in Kokiri forest-- we beat Ghoma-Deku, and are given access to Hyrule field. The moment of walking out into the field for the first time is a keenly remembered one for many gamers, I think, in that the dimensionality of what is possible seems to totally explode at that moment-- castle visible in the difference, flying things all around, sun falling in the sky preparing for night... This is a <i>hard-lined</i> shift, from one hard-coded space into another, but we'll find in life that such dramatic transitions, even when triggered by a seemingly discrete event, weave themselves endlessly into past and future, and that indeed these transitions end up being more of a <i>connective tissue</i> in our lives than the supposed fixednesses themselves. That transitions, or shifts, are the <i>ground</i> of the life we're living.. The <i>flux</i> idea, from Heraclitus et. al-- same thing...<br />
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So, these are the two poles of the idea-- (relative) stasis and change. The first, stasis, corresponding to the "possibility space" we're all accustomed to spatializing and theorizing about. The second, <i>change</i>, corresponding to the SHIFTING, to the Time aspect of play, its music.<br />
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The kinds of spaces we want to imagine, then, are composed of these <i>situational objects</i> (like KOKIRI VILLAGE, or HYRULE FIELD), which are the fixed <i>things</i> of the Idea, and which condition our possibilities as we travel through...<br />
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But more importantly for our purposes, these situations are composed of necessarily <i>context sensitive </i>events that act as catalysts, transitioning the space into something totally new. I remember I learned this concept from Conker's Bad Fur Day when I was a kid, explaining the SHIFTY nature of the B-button, which would respond differently based on the situation..<br />
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These catalysts are sometimes discrete event-'clicks' like the B-button, but they are just as often <i>rhythmical </i>or <i>tonal/pitched, </i>repetitive,<i> </i>dispersed across a time-field, such as the 'flocking' mechanics that can happen in improvised music, where a little tendril of ornamental excitement from one player might be mimicked and amplified in the others to the point of phase-shift, where the improvisation was once moving in a fixed rhythmic-tonal space, now it's exploded into free-rhythm/non-counted pulses, non-counted tonalities, with its own new set of possible relations/feelings.<br />
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With the SPS idea <i>formalized</i>, it should be possible to describe the <i>spacetime</i> of a given situation, which is <i>curved </i>by the objects that populate it, just like our spacetime.<br />
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This is done, first, by simply identifying the objects and processes at play (which OOO counts as objects, too, and indeed as long as they are <i>functions</i> this is the case).<br />
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Second, by <i>PLAYING</i> them, and working out internal relations (music) from this experience, bottom-up, local SPS, as opposed to top-down, global PS / Universal Set.<br />
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The way we each, individually, choose to engage objects in spacetime, describes the curvature of that spacetime, and it will be DIFFERENT for each player, because we are attracted to different things with differing degrees of intensity. Thus, a probabilistic description of the gamespace is doomed, as it attempts to map a sequence of <i>different</i> playings onto space and to then <i>divide</i> this space into a statistical average, forgetting the attractional & repulsive vectors of experiential time which qualified the space as such in the first place.<br />
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Objects, processes, constants, variables.. etc ! So, programing proves to be an immensely useful tool for conceptualizing these situations.<br />
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But is <i>not</i> THE theoretical answer to shifting possibility spaces, by any means. This should be obvious! This is not 'code-level formalism', even if it uses concepts from code to articulate the structures of immediate experience.<br />
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This is part of why SHIFTING possibility spaces are used in contrast to straight up "possibility spaces" -- as long as the space is forever shifting, the particular instance of it that we are experiencing <i>right now</i> cannot be counted as a mere repetition, and is <i>always a unique natural occurence</i>. We must tune into the <i>play</i> experience, to experience even the same computational "game state" as two totally different things when we encounter it at two different times in our life... Allow our body to be the medium...<br />
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It's the same with music situations. And I can see RIGHT NOW that maybe the whole talk should have focused on a zoom into this slide, to articulate the means of <i>objectifying</i> music spaces, to count the contours of situations, etc., and to speculate as to relations between these objective contours and the <i>means of transitioning between</i>.<br />
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But for now let me just point you to a couple books:<br />
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One of which is Adam Harper's excellent <i>Infinite Music</i>, which describes the 'progressive differentiation of music space', how musical <i>difference</i> happens.. Ethics of <i>variability-- SHIFT.. </i>It is a beautiful kind of new-Pythagoreanism that I'd hope might reinvigorate interest in the relation between musical, geometrical and metaphysical structures as has been so popular throughout much of pre-modern history... That <i>new geometries</i> is required is obvious (the old <i>musica universalis</i> being based on the integer harmonic series and an incorrect mapping of this to planetary motions)-- Harper's geometries flow very nicely into those of much of the speculative flux-philosophy that is popular today~~ like that of Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Manuel DeLanda, Alfred North Whitehead.. following, too, the pre-hyperdub qabbalah of the Nick Land/kode9 etc's Cybernetic Cultures Research Group, and the possibility of <i>liberation numerologies..</i> A new geometry of <i>mereotopology</i> (parts and whole relations and their interlinkings), navigating by the local <i>drift</i> / nomad, etc... This is an image that is so exciting to me, a music theory that does not stop at sound, and thus which does not stop at <i>anything-- </i>returning, perhaps, to that old-fashioned theory of musical connectivity, which I think will prove immensely <i>useful ! </i><br />
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I read David Byrne's new book recently, too, and it is less explicitly theoretical, but comes from a similar point of view, that all music is <i>contextual, situated</i>, and describes this position with a kind of everyday ease that some might find lacking in Harper's more coded/ scholastic style. Bryne's <i>objects</i> are VENUES, MONEY, SOFTWARE, STUDIO, ENO, OVERDUBS... etc ! These will <i>curve</i> the experience of spacetime just as much as anything else.<br />
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The goal with music design, then, is to MAP game spaces onto music spaces, or vice-versa. Or back and forth, etc. To identify objects/processes and the curvatures of played spacetime that they suggest (ways of playing they invite us into), and to show how two sets, one music and one game, can be corresponded to one another by allowing their constitutive objects to play similar roles.<br />
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And the most simple example of how this is implemented is the idea of MICKEY-MOUSING, which plays a musical event for every haptic/visual game event.<br />
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This is the most simple AND the most complex tactic, according to the relative complexity of the gamespace itself.<br />
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It is THE music design tactic. Which should not be looked on as gimmicky, as has been the case in movies.<br />
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In movies, the mickey-mousing is not involved in <i>turning the movie into a musical instrument</i>.<br />
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In games, mickey-mousing always serves this function. Because we are in haptic contact with the game, when events are given musical skin, we become hyper-attuned to the possibility of <i>playing</i> those events, and this is how a musical instrument is born in the first place..<br />
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So ^^^ this is a <i>dogma</i> that I used for a whole<br />
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But of course, the dogma need not be heeded. Leaving some game elements un-scored will have the effect of amplifying the attention we give to other parts, which is useful in any number of ways.<br />
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The Assassin's Creed example that I put up here last year does this, where only <i>footsteps</i> and <i>murder</i> are given corresponding musical elements. And murder is only a chord change.<br />
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Are they?<br />
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It was a rhetorical question all along!<br />
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I've found the concept useful, and will probably keep exploring it, but the point is <i>not</i> that this is a fact, an objectively TRUE proposition.. This all depends on how you want to understand games and music--<br />
Rather, the point is that it is a <i>useful</i> one if you are interested in doing things that play with the ideas of games and music existing in any sort of pairing, and that it is useful for moving past this too--<br />
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Now, the avoce-- I believe THIS IS a true proposition.<br />
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Videogames are called games by habit, but this habit has put us in a funny place, because the structural requirements of the game theoretical GAMES we are used to calling games (which can be played <i>optimally) </i>are by no means a material requirement of this medium.<br />
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Even when games are apparently very game-like, it is not that they are actually games, with rules that we follow, etc. We are led through a system of bifurcations in the computer, of branching paths, sometimes the paths <i>insanely</i> dense with branches, and we are given <i>end states</i> every once in a while,which tell us that we've lost, or that we've done well, or whatever.<br />
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If we choose to follow the rules that are suggested to us, then the game feels very much like the optimizable games that we have known.<br />
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But if we don't choose to internalize the rules, these screens often can feel absurd, out of place.<br />
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The game is IN US. If we want it to be a game, it will be... but if we want otherwise....<br />
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Then we can just <i>drift</i>.<br />
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And the fact that free-and-easy wandering is possible AT ALL in videogames, no matter how much we're told <i>not to-- </i>the fact that MOVEMENT cannot be avoided -- this seems to me to suggest that the <i>drift</i> is a more fundamental aspect of videogame materiality than any sort of relationship to game theoretical optimizable games.<br />
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We can <i>move</i> or <i>play</i> in videogames-- not much more can be said definitively. I am interested in a <i>formalism</i> (yes! all the better since everyone is jumping the ship, it seems) that builds from this premise, that regards this movement in much the same way that musical movement is regarded, which has meanings, but meanings which are unspeakable, which are living in the material itself, and which mean very little when divorced from the context.<br />
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So, really, this is how I'd originally thought the idea of "shifting possibility spaces"-- that it's just the most reasonable way of describing what a videogame is, when confronted with the inescapable truth that <i>a videogame is not, or need not be, a game</i>.<br />
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Game-naming politics will go on, but I'd like to try to imagine a future where things have settled down and either <i>everything</i> or <i>nothing</i> is allowed to be a game-- where the fact of <i>playing</i> takes precedence, and the <i>materials</i> that are playing back-- and that the game is still regarded as a <i>conversation</i> like Chris Crawford has said, but that it emphatically one of mutual receptivity, rather than one of control/persuasion--<br />
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I like to imagine that a point of view from along these lines could be regarded as <i>more realistic</i> than that of the GAME OBJECT image and its corresponding representational-boxes sculpted by the designer from the top-down/Universe who has God's perspective, where all the shifts are part of an unchanging whole in His control.<br />
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And the same thing with music.<br />
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We're still living in the age of the music object, and there will be more of this still, but the sooner that we can respect that OBJECTS ARE SPACES, I think, and that <i>we can play spaces</i>-- the sooner we'll be on our way to allowing all the connections that are possible to be forged between these concept-groups.<br />
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So, ultimately SPS feels useful to me as a SPACE in which to dissolve seemingly disparate played categories. Like a bucket to pour materials into, which can be mixed up with water (quintessential SPS substance), and turned into a new whole of some kind, a time-irreversible process of making mush out of categories that, once mushed, can no longer be separated and counted as properly discrete units.<br />
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SPS operates on the hope one day maybe it wouldn't be very strange at all to talk about games and musics and all other PLAYSPACES as <i>one substance--</i> composed of many, but all of which can easily <i>speak</i> to one another and <i>listen</i>, because of their shared structure in time, which is concerned with immanent possibility and its contigency on the particulars of the situation which are ALWAYS going to change, even if some more gradually than others.<br />
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New Wholes from Mush.</div>
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Here are some particular strategies/ things I have learned while working on different games.<br />
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I've learned a lot more, too! This is just a little brain-dump, trying to connect design pragmatics/particulars to the theory that I've covered up to now.<br />
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Panoramical's 18-dimensional phase, controlled by 18 parameters on a MIDI controller or other, seems to me to be a PERFECT starting model of these ideas, and how they could be connected both to concepts in playsapces that are so easy that infants (infantile!) or animals could play them (all you do is <i>touch, slide</i>), and to concepts in math (the 18-d space itself), and how, building from here, mathematical concepts might be used to enrich N-dimensional spaces in such a way that <i>animals can still play them</i>.<br />
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Panoramical is ready-proof that a HIGH-DIMENSIONAL system is not really so confusing when we encounter it <i>locally, </i>knob to knob.<br />
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Even without connectivity between dimensions, a high degree of complexity is possible, the local states of which are determined by the <i>point</i> in phase space represented by the current values of the parameters, and the <i>line</i> which leads up to that point, which dances in some or all of the 18-dimensions. The relations <i>between </i>dimensions are the sorts of <i>harmonic</i> relations in this space, pointing to a connection between an SPS of this sort, where <i>all is given</i> in advance, and say, the piano keyboard as SPS---we would not consider it to be a 'dynamic' game, the piano, but the harmonic combinations we channel through it alters our own sense of possibility, and indeed when we have been playing on the white keys for a while, stratifying habit, the black keys do not <i>attract</i> our fingers so strongly-- habit, too, is an object which curves spacetime.<br />
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"Architecture is frozen music"-- via Goethe and others<br />
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Now, it is possible to create these architectural spaces that are rather LIQUID than solid, as Fernando Ramallo has done in the visual environments, and it becomes interesting to plug this new empirical evidence of liquid architecture back into the equation, which now reads:<br />
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"Architecture is music" (which, I guess, can be SOLID (frozen, traditional), LIQUID (videogame), or GASEOUS (4chan?).<br />
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I have no idea how to do a dimensional model of Dyad-- there is <i>a lot</i> going on!<br />
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Even without being able to wholly <i>count</i> the full dimensionality of the system at play, though, it was possible to tune into all the micro-rthythms of the game, to separate them into Classes of events, interactions, etc., and to put together a list of 'homework' to get done, all of the parts needed to adequately account for the progressive <i>differences</i> at each moment of playing...<br />
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What was KEY with Dyad, was being comfortable producing TONS of stuff.. WORK WORK. And to be happy doing this, to treat the work AS PLAY.<br />
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To <i>not judge</i> the work, but to just get it done. There was some judging, to be sure, but it was mostly playing, with the belief that it didn't matter so much <i>what</i> the particular content or SKIN of the game's soundtrack was, but rather than the skin hugged the muscles/game feel nicely..<br />
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Much of the Dyad work with Shawn McGrath is the most intensive 'music-organism' shaping I've done, with lots of attention to detail, little volume fluctuations at every point of played contact-- so many details, you zoom into one and lose track of the others, and what is achieved is a strange hyper-intensive messiness/ornamentation which gives particular affective potency to different mechanics in different situations, such that the original CLASSIFICATION of them into groups becomes more difficult, each particular is its own thing..<br />
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Finally, Proteus-- It used again, similar mickey-mousing type techniques throughout, for animals, environment, seasons, weather, etc..<br />
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What I want to emphasize in Proteus work, though, which is very much reflected in the existing rhythm of the final product, is the GRADUAL work that went into it.<br />
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Slow work. Non-work.<br />
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Ed Key had been working on it for a year before I came on board already, but even once I joined up, a lot of time was spent discussing themes, possibilities, this sometimes more than actually putting in any new content.<br />
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The shared mood that was created was the PLAY of making the game, and there was work, too, but this, at its best, <i>amplified</i> the play, the non-work, rather than negating it..<br />
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The WORK is key, too, but the energy for work was nourished by a taste for non-work ~~ it will be important to nourish work on videogames in general from things outside of those games.<br />
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Some of the most powerful experiences I had with Proteus were the early builds I played, before I had put in any music. I just loaded up the game, and played in silence for a few hours. <i>Imagining </i>the form of the music, the mood of it, the structure of its possibilities, even if I didn't imagine any musical themes in particular. This brings us back to the Kandinsky painting from earlier-- and the possibility of <i>listening</i> with other organs than the ears.. Listening with the <i>eyes</i>, listening with the <i>fingers/touch-- </i>these have felt like KEY tactics throughout all of this work, and by no means am i a clinical "synesthete"-- I do think this is a kind of mood or way of playing that can be entered into by trying to amplify <i>receptivity</i>.<br />
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And thus, the <i>non-work. </i>Being receptive cannot be a strong-willed <i>WORK</i> because it requires a silencing of the will that is that active agent which allows work to happen in the first place..<br />
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It is possible, too, to balance work and receptivity, and I have managed this on a few occasions-- but I have not figured out any consistent method for doing so.<br />
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Where to go with these ideas?<br />
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Following Darius Kazemi's pretty aptly titled "FUCK VIDEOGAMES"-- I'm enjoying taking this image of SPS or playspaces broadly and studying all the variety of forms it takes <i>outside</i> of videogames proper.<br />
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I <i>do</i> think there will be a strong role for videogames to play in our lifetimes (RE: Ludic Century), but I'm certain that they're still not there, having not opened up to inspiration from the space of all playspaces, and the possibility of finding mechanism-independent structures in these that can be <i>computed</i> in videogames without full loss of meaning (with NEW meaning, at least, where the old has been lost).<br />
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So, i'm interested in looking at these playspaces outside of games, but then-- slightly contrary to what Kazemi wrote-- to attempt to integrate them into a zoomed out framework of shifting possibility spaces in general, such that what is 'outside' of games is not thought of as being <i>essentially</i> outside, but rather accidentally so.<br />
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I listed some examples of these other playspaces above, a list that I've not really seen any attempt to integreate into the 'ludological' framework.<br />
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I mentioned earlier the desire for an SPS formalism-- this is probably quite an unpopular desire right now, at a time when games-formalisms are being rejected all over the place, but it feels to me <i>necessary</i> in some way. I see the shadows of the the canonic game thoeretical formalisms even in those games that critique the dominant formal strategies.<br />
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It seems to me that it's not a question of IGNORING the existing formalisms, but of LEARNING from them, and DESTROYING them in LOVE, blending them up (like we DESTROY a mango for a smoothie we want), in order that they might be recombined, particle by particle, into a formal framework that does NOT stop at game theory, but which allows for analyses of <i>all playspaces</i>, whether this be done musically, mathematically, etc.. almost <i>certainly </i>pseudoscientifically.<br />
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So, lists of <i>other</i> kinds of playspaces ought to proliferate, and we ought not be afraid of the potential this category has to blossom into a new kind of <i>everything </i>(this is what the proper meaning of ludic century would blow open into, in my opinion).<br />
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All these practices involving <i>free movement</i> -- PLAYSPACES -- the question is to find the practices that we LOVE and VALUE the most, and to NOT limit these to videogames-- and to immerse ourselves in <i>these</i> practices, to learn from them what we can, and the possibly, if we feel the desire to do so, to <i>bring back</i> our love of these things to games. To <i>count</i> aspects of the processes in such a way that they can be computed with-- but to <i>not</i> disrespect that thing we came to love in the first place.. Not to <i>gamify</i> it, but rather to learn from it what a game <i>actually</i> is, to learn its pattens of movement, the parts of the body and social milieu that it engages, et etc.<br />
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So, with this I become a dogmatist again-- <i>shifting possibility spaces</i> as a 'fixed' idea to explore the interrelations between these categories, a ceaselessly transforming substrate or matrix on which apparent differences can be thought and combined/reconciled in action.</div>
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Is there an <i>SPS Realism </i>that we could imagine? It doesn't seem too far-fetched.. I can't think of anything that does not fall under the umbrella.</div>
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Now, what is useful about this is precisely the possibility of dispensing with the graphical and other shallow 'realisms' that games are obsessed with today, and to tune into their rhythms, and the shifts of context that they employ, and the relations of these shifts to those that we experience in life.</div>
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From this perspective, it could be possible to design wholly 'abstract' games, with no representational elements, that are nonetheless SPS-realistic, having something to say in their time-flows that reflects the time-flows and harmonies of our lived experiences..</div>
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haaaaahhha, but it's TRUE. </div>
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The question for videogame-pragmatics is to stop trying to read games as art, and to start trying to read arts as 'games' (broadly considered), as played things, from the creator's POV (conscious or reconstructed fiction), or the viewer (tho only insofar as <i>viewing is creating</i>)-- to find out what these things <i>mean,</i> not as things but as active <i>ways</i> whose gravitational pulls we enter into-- as flux-worlds, chaos-cosmos, process-organism, <i>shifting possibility spaces</i>.</div>
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<br />David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com59tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-30016975075294047192013-10-21T15:21:00.001-07:002013-10-21T15:21:33.564-07:00Favorite Game SOUNDTRACKS, Part 2<div class="p1">
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I was slightly caught off guard when I tried to put together a list of my fav game soundtracks for an interview with Dazed & Confused, which is posted <a href="http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/17500/1/david-kanaga-s-top-five-inspiring-video-game-soundtracks">HERE</a> --</div>
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I mentioned some other <i>games</i> in addition to these, but since I think Dazed wasn't wanting to confuse its audience too much with border-case inclusions like <i>Cobra</i> or <i>Infinite Sketchpad + Samplr</i>, I'd like to add some notes here on those EXCEPTIONS which are important to me--</div>
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These are games or software/play-spaces more generally that have been some of <i>the most</i> inspirational to me as to how I think about music & interaction as a dissolved/whole touched unit-- I suspect all of these exist on some as-yet-unnamed continuum composed of a gradient of these software-instruments+ways of playing fading into the strictly computational videogames I mentioned in the link.</div>
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My interest in games comes as much from fascination with and love for these other playspaces/softwares and working/playing methods as it does from videogames proper. There's no easy 'edge' we can point to separating these categories games/other, and i think the boundary line is an interesting place to play around…</div>
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So-- here are a few more of the entries I'll put on my 'favorite game soundtracks' list, allowing the edges of the "game"-idea to broaden up some, and allowing 'soundtrack' to be approached from a <i>player's</i> perspective, rather than a listener's, with the necessary recognition of <i>touch</i> in the music.</div>
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<b>0. Playing Music & Not recording</b></div>
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I've often had the thought that all of the very best pieces of music can <i>never have been recorded</i>, because they are literally impossible to record in their <i>touched</i> aspect. A musical happening really only ever happens <i>once</i>, and even when accounting for the supposed fixedness/objectivity of recordings this fact remains, because recordings leave a 'remainder' that is not recorded, and when recordings themselves are played back-- listened to, danced to, cut/drifted in-- they facilitate yet another temporally unique music piece/game/situation which will leave a remainder with any attempt to record it. So! I like to play these improv games and, at my best, to <i>record their output as little as possible</i>. Psychically, once the objects we're playing with begin to solidify structurally <i>as recordings</i>, the perceived contingency and fluidity of the improv space can be difficult to get back in touch with. Materially, it is a fact that a recording does NOT record the full <i>touch </i>of the music, but only the sound-spectrum vibrations on an analog-digital line/sequence producing in us virtual images in sound, where our ears are meant to make up for the experiences not granted to all of our skin and internals, the touch of keys, blow of horns, group dynamics & ESPs etc.</div>
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<b>A. Group Improvisation</b></div>
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Group improvisation is the most fluid-- and in this <i>liquid-</i>sense, game-like--of all the musical games, in a way. It is the game which holds all the others as parts of itself. Any group improv is going to be a complex ecosystem of personalities, instruments, moods, spaces, powers etc. Just like Dungeons & Dragons (& other non-digital RPGs) with rules interpreted freely is sort of The Ideal Game for those that are into free-play imagination games, group improv music is an Ideal Game for those into free-play <i>music games</i>-- it is endlessly generative and compelling as long as we come to it with the energy to dive in and <i>listen and move</i>.. The group improv model exists in the same game-space as a D&D game that has abandoned prescribed rules in favor of communal generative situational-architectures, which taps into a kind of utopianism in games like that of New Babylon etc. The sense in which they are <i>real movements</i> with real psychic effects, etc. The improvisations catalogued at the <a href="http://ilinxgroup.bandcamp.com/">ilinxgroup bandcamp </a>hesitantly break with the "no recording" game-- the sense in stopping this game is in allowing recordings themselves their full material capacities-- maybe they could be instructive listening 'maps' for recreating images of the shifting games that were happening, moving between total disengaged banality and collective ecstasy, sometimes within a span of a few breaths. ILINX means "vertigo" and is the play-aspect of <i>change</i> in music and games and rollercoasters in general, and is something like a guardian spirit of VARIATION in improvisation (which is itself the working spirit of composition). Presupposing in improvisations a <i>ground</i> which is <i>motion </i>itself or constant variation is a useful <i>working hypothesis</i> for research into new game forms that are inspired from the intuitive flows of music and which cannot yet be counted as structure/software/computation..</div>
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<b>1. Cobra</b></div>
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<a href="http://hermes.neocities.org/zorn-cobra-score.pdf">Cobra Score</a></div>
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This is my favorite structured group improv game I've played. It's by John Zorn, a piece from his set of "game pieces", he calls them. It allows for a really unique element of high-level structural control from the bottom-up, something which is typically either not present (in much free improvisation, which is so good at forgetting past and future, and rarely maps time onto space), or reduced to top-down elastic-linear block structures "on-rails" (a la "Free Jazz", "Ascension"). In <i>Cobra</i>, there are a bunch of mechanics that can be called out by individual players via body cues, which are then relayed by a conductor/prompter such as to instruct the playing of the entire group. This is a really BEAUTIFUL means of giving radical structural control of "top-down" (State) infrastructure to the "bottom-up" <i>players</i>.. The particular set of improv mechanics themselves are beautiful, too! Favorites: Memory cards, Cross-fades, New York rule (middle finger at anyone instantly stops them). Unfortunately John Zorn doesn't encourage folks to play the game away from his presence, because he still thinks of it as a "piece" more than a "game." But luckily, the rules are around, thanks to some pirate, linked above "Cobrea Score": <i>highly recommend</i> getting together friends, musicians & non-musicians whatever, and trying this out.. Usually takes a few hours of practice to learn & internalize the rules (even w/o the Guerilla Tactics, which I've not played with, but seem very interesting, too, an amplified bottom-up dissolve/multiplicity contrasting with the clean democratic-fascism of the prompts), and then once you've learned, new things coming up in playing really can last forever..</div>
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<b>2. Flux Game</b></div>
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Very BASIC archetypal game, maybe has also gone by other names. Using a similar structure to <i>Cobra,</i> where the bottom-up is given instantaneous control of the top down in a sequence of singular-transitions-- this game is like an abstraction all of Fluxus scripts counted as one "space of all possible ______ ". Players at the beginning write a bunch of 'scripts' or prompts for the group; these are all thrown in a bucket; game begins when anyone feels like it, they ding a bell that has been set next to the cards, draw a card, and read a prompt; everyone does what is called for by the card, there are no guidelines as to what a card can present as a rule, this goes on indefinitely; whenever anyone feels bored, they are to immediately go to the bell, ding, and draw the next card. The game loops on this pattern until the final ding and then it's over. It can be a very strange experience, with really positive and really uneasy feelings both (the negative, often an empathetic result of enforcing or not enforcing change, as it can feel overly controlling to ding when the rest of the group is enjoying themselves). This is basically a music game, but music's territory is expanded radically and this is its relation to flux(us)-- its commitment to <i>all materials</i>, sound-making or not, as manifesting a temporal musical aspect that can be played. This leap, where structure and materials are musical independent of their sound-making aspects, has been really important for me in 'reading' videogames, where their existing non-sonic architecture can already rightfully be thought of as a piece of music, simply-- missing its sounds.</div>
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<b>B. Solo Improvisation</b></div>
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I like to think that even "solo music" is not at all solo. There is <i>always</i> the dialogue between player and instrument to account for. I heard somewhere of some group that believes <i>instruments are human beings</i>, and I like this!<i> </i>Whether or not we go this far, the idea of an instrument as <i>personality</i> or <i>organism</i> is not difficult to feel when really get into it, constantly listening & responding to the physicality of the instrument, which seems to have its own will/desires, its receptivities and resistances both. Like a snare drum roll-- you drop a stick, and there's a ch-ch-ch that speeds up into a buzz; the process of sustaining this buzz as a pseudo-equilibrium is pure body intelligence/haptics. The relation of singing to breath-rhythms (see breathing rules for "music for 18 musicians" for interesting <i>speed-harmonization</i> technique with this rhythm) is a similarly tangled relation between the player's body and the 'musical information' we are used to accounting for.</div>
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<b>1. Ableton's Simpler</b></div>
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One of my very favorite '1-player' musical games to play is just cruising through samples, and triggering them on the keyboard, playing back at them, letting them 'play' me with their hard-coded rhythms responding to elastic stretchings/compressions. here's how I play:</div>
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With a) a <i>start position</i> variable to scrub with (VISUALLY is best, so I use the one with the triangle-head (pictured TOO FAST in the above gif), so that I can move to where I want in the sound a la soundcloud etc; b) with a <i>keyboard</i> triggering samples c) drifting around octave fourth and fifth key-relations, or planing by smaller intervals for rave block progs.</div>
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It is key to remember that the sample is VISUALIZED this whole time, which makes this process fairly different from, say, sampling off vinyl, which is more linear, less spatial (with its own advantages (scratch/pitch-zoom)). In constructing our internal model of Simpler's "soundtrack" structure, we want to think of the interface and its visualized virtual-haptic waveform-space + manifold variables as the 'game' which is being soundtracked by a variable <i>AnySoundWhatever</i>, given its 'skin' by plugging in any existing recording.</div>
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In this space, across the surface/skin/waveform, I 'visit' different areas of a sample, and 'drift' through them, quite literally, a path/driftway connecting disparate zones that could be drawn out with lines following the play-head which is either moving continuously, or discontinuously cutting to a new position. Based on how often a sample is retriggered, more or less of a zone/subset of the sample will be in the 'field of view', the 'attention' will be focused there (visually and sonically) and this is the equivalent of a kind of ZOOM into the music, exploring its textures and relations as they exist isolated, repeated and recombined at different scales. Samplr (below) is even better with this zoom-feel, but simplr gives simple intuitive access to both START-POSITION and PITCH (keyboard), which allows it to function as connective-process between sample-play and keyboard-play, the latter which I enjoy very much on its own, too:</div>
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<b>2. Keyboard White-Black Organism</b></div>
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"The keyboard-game's soundtrack" -- What does this feel like, what does it look like, and what are the relations between its sounds and its feel/look? </div>
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It's sometimes embarassing for professional musicians to play on all white keys or all black keys, "being limited to C Major / F# Major pentatonic and their cousin modes is such a severe constraint" the thinking goes. But I have a keyboard, as do many others, that can transpose its layout-key relations, such that any diatonic music (which is the superset of the intervalic relations exhibited by the white keys), can be comfortably played on all white keys, or restricted to the pentatonic fundamentals on all black keys (where B and F whites can be added to the palette for access to the more dissonant perfect fourth and major 7th relations, respectively), and thus much of the <i>practice</i> required of musicians in conventional training, in order to gain facility across all keys, is automated by a simple shift in my input/output relation to the instrument, pitch-shifting up or down, to play in all keys. Black & White: I see & feel these as the polar "gravitational centers" of the keyboard, because they are the most clearly differentiated 2 subsets of the instrument, when we look at or touch it and begin to count it as a composition of parts. White and black, everyone knows this about a keyboard. This in how my attention immediately grasps them, and this is the sense in which white & black keys function in the music <i>as game</i>, outside of reducibility to sound-information, always embdedded in the instruments physical design and my bodily perception of it in sight and touch. I prefer the black keys to the white because of the greater differentiation of feel with the raised height and 3+2 grouping, a sense of difference which is not possible on the white keys unless we scoot our fingers up the keyboard such that they brush with the black (otherwise, all white key spacings feel the same). Starting from the pentatonic relations on the black keys, then, it is possible to play even more harmonic complex music with the strong haptic grounding of octave/4/5-identifications in the 3+2 touch-rhythm, 'drifting away' from the centers at will, allowing the white keys to come into play, but specifically as a tension or deviation from the <i>consistent ground</i> of the harmony, rather than as manifesting the potential for free-modulatory movement the keyboard was built for in the first place. This is the main constraint with this style-- its tendency toward non-modulation, and the possibility of transition liquidation in harmonic movement, a style, or game/way of playing, which reached its apparent potential for smooth change of gravity in late renaissance/baroque styles, and has largely been ignored in recent pop/recorded music. If we desire to retrieve and transform that style, however, the possibilties of music space-automation suggest that we may be able to bypass conventional models of learning technique, rather <i>playing with</i> another player/game/space that <i>thinks</i> these things for us, as a gift. An added bonus is that a proper <i>reproduction</i> will not be possible with new automations-- it will be corrupt, accidental, and from these accidents it could be possible to count the grounds of a new grammar/framework. A basic trick I've played with along these lines is to automate pitch-shifting along the circle of 4ths, changing every few seconds, allowing for the strangeloop model of transposition, where by traveling in one direction around the circle's edge we end up back at where we started. It is possible thus to play "black key" music ontop of a constantly-transposing automation system, which allows for a consistent set of relations between sight, touch, & pitch-interval-distribution, that merely <i>shift</i> their ground under you, with no foresight required, only response. And if you do this for hours and collect the data, I haven't tried, but I'd guess that the statistical distribution of 'pitch-class' information (<i>all octave</i> Cs, <i>all octave</i> Ebs, etc.), will look very similar to that in a <i>serialist</i> piece of music, which has proceeded by repeating a pitch class only after all of the other pitch classes have been played-- the measure of <i>entropy</i> stays (roughly) the same viewed at this level. Considered broadly, black key music has become serialism, but of an altogether more intuitive sort, that priveleges <i>touch</i> and low-integer harmonic-relations, whereas the serialists almost uniformly privileged <i>counting</i> and the principle of universal-relative consonance.. Following this, and you come away with a kind of serial-pentatonic pop-music..</div>
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<b>3. Loops / Repetition as Objectification-Spatialization</b></div>
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Making music with computers, the possible relations we can have with repetition are <i>very different</i> from those of the oft-mentioned instrumental works of the minimalists, which are supposed to be regarded as ancestral predecessors of computer music today. Instrumental minimalism enforces a<i> very particular</i> kind of bodily-ritual in the process of reproducing the piece-- i.e. tuning into 'infinitesimal approach' phase relation-drifts over long periods (<i>Piano Phase</i>), breathing patterns (<i>Music for 18 Musicians</i>), and generally-- <i>being (bodily) the immanent cause of the repetition</i> throughout performance/play, such that the repetition's energy is always coming from the human-player, rather than instrumental/machine collaborators (Terry Riley's delay-jams and Steve Reich tape pieces being obvious exceptions, Philip Glass' taste for <i>amplification</i> is similarly engaged in <i>automation-research</i>). With computer repetitions, it is altogether different, and this is the mode of music-making I've grown up with, FruityLoops 16-step sequencer is the <i>ground</i> I learned. You can make a loop, and just turn it on, hit play, and it will continue going. And your body has become disconnected from the <i>cause</i> of the sound-making. This disconnection is not desirable in itself, but it is not bad, either. The important thing I've found is that I can remain embodied <i>in </i>the music as long as I just <i>keep playing with it</i>. The more active/willful approach to this can be accomplished by <i>touching</i> and manipulating the sound, as with the 'Simpler' example above, which acknowledges the sound for what it has become, something like a vibrating 2-dimensional tapestry which can be cut, stitched, scrunched, pulled at will-- here we might load the sample in an audio-brick of Ableton's session instead, so that <i>loop</i> is turned on, and we're exploring the changing properties of that loop-- as <i>object, an extensive space, or game, that is played by drifting the playback position and loop-edges and which is soundtracked by the variable skin of the waveform. </i>The more passive/receptive approach is to to let the loop go <i>for a long time</i>, and to stand up away from the computer, and to walk around, <i>listening</i>, stretch/etc, sing, dance-- or to just sit and listen and soak, or to 'walk around' with another instrument on top of the loop-- to keep it the loop automated, going on without change, forever, & to just play on top, learning its contours and ways of playing with those, to engage with the spatialized music object not as displayed on the computer screen but rather in our more fluid memory-flows, which can become very good at predicting and spatializing time-experience, but which are nonetheless always irreducible to space, always renewing themselves, the internal model changing constantly, with every drift, loop, etc.</div>
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<b>4. Overdubs & Smooth Time</b></div>
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We don't really <i>need</i> to compose by counting objects onto space anymore, and I never really enjoyed doing that when it interfered with the immediate output of the sound itself. Spatial mapping was the paradigm of Western notation, and really most <i>systems</i> of music, even those that are merely counted but not visualized (all countings are visualized in mental images). There have always <i>nudgings</i> of time-relations in musical performance-- e.g. "stolen time", rubato-- which have pointed toward a more elastic count-- but in the last century, there has been a swarm of radical new time structures that seem to exist entirely outside of the level of 'counted time' we're used to having to deal with in spatialized compositon. The serialist's rhythms, again, loop around and their 'determinacy' meets with the angular contours of free improvs 'indeterminacy.' Again, the computer's capacity for <i>automating/counting behavior</i> allows for new ways of ignoring and yet loving/benefitting from the tradition of systematicity in music. OVERDUBBING GAME: 0) turn off quantization 1) play an improv, whatever; 2) loop if you want to learn to <i>know</i> it as spatialized-memory; 3) play another improv on top; 4) sync events, or not; 5) repeat 2-4 as often as you'd like. // It's remarkable how quickly it's possible to make a piece of music in this way, <i>especially when you choose to NOT sync events</i>-- to allow time to be <i>smooth</i>, even when it is unintentional. If the total piece is 2:00 long, the total processing time for creating the 'track' might have been as short as 4:00 -- one improv + another one <i>immediately after</i>. That's a fun game! It build's on the space explored by tape-overdubbing & delay petals, but the SPEED of the computer adds totally new rhythmic possibilities and continuities if you would like, for instance the above 1+1 overdub which creates a track with length <i>n</i> and production time <i>2n</i>, and is a continuous stream of events which looks like -- 1. first jam 2. second jam 3. finished track --- all of this, with no gaps to speak of between 1, 2 & 3, which we know well because gaps would cause production time to be greater than <i>2n</i>, which it's not.</div>
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<b>4. Through-Composition: Transition Liquidations</b></div>
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Composition-objects, especially when any loops are involved, often leave us with a hard-edged <i>block</i> of sound (track), with high-level sequence (super-track (finished track, album, etc)) reduced to block after block after block (horizontal) on block on block on block (vertical) . The process of chiseling/melting away at these blocks such that they can be welded together anew, recombined in a continuous form, is called "transition liquidation", where transitions are gradually de-composed from block to block, to several different blocks to different blocks, and with the speculative Ideal always present which reminds us of the possibility of always decomposing into atoms/molecules which flow as slow liquids when 'viewed' from a higher level, and whose <i>flows</i> now become the subject of composition, irreducible to the count of the consistent plane of blocks. This is such a large category as to almost account for all of traditional composition in general, insofar as it is <i>spatialized time</i> which is composed of vertical (texture), horizontal (time/change), and vertical-horizontal (N-dimensional intensive textural calculus ?) parameters and their relations. These transition liquidations exist on a continuum between the DJ mix and its crossfades, and the insanesly involved transitional spaces of so much polyphonic classical musics and free improvs, most all of which are concerned in some sense with dissolving blocks (tracks, harmonies, rhythms, formal ABA~~ patterns etc) at different levels of scale/magnification/distance. The idea of "through-composition" is that strict repetition is dispensed with, that there is little or no repetition without variation. It's like music that has taken a form that we are more familiar with navigating in the written word. </div>
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<b>3. Samplr + Infinite Sketchpad + Pseudo-Mereotopology</b></div>
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<i>Samplr</i> is my favorite sampler I've played with-- it's on the iPad and takes the sample-cruising of simpler et. al into some new territory, where now the visual interface has also become a haptic-connect surface that we play just by touching visually relevant bits, and when we play the sample, we get the sense that even a cat might be able to do this. Samplr has a few different modes of control-- my favorite takes two finger-holds of input pressed on top of a sample, and loops the region between them. By swapping fingers you can easily move between forward and reverse playback, and it is so so easy to change loop size, to the point of it being difficult to sustain tempo-equilibrium even, such that the rhythm of the sample and its relation to both its composition and our body's position in space & connection to the pad becomes all tangled up. This feels not only like contact with another <i>organism-</i>like thing, but even, at its most intimate, a kind of extension of our own body. Zooming in far eventually loops such a small segment of the sample that it turns into a drone on a single pitch, which can be smudged around to discover melodies. </div>
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Alongside, paired w/ Samplr is <i>Infinite Sketchpad</i>, which there is way too little space to talk about here, <i>more soon,</i> but BASICALLY-- it's drawing software (using the same finger-to-pad touch as samplr) that allows for effectively infinite zooming in and out, drawing on a 'fractal blank canvas" which is <i>through-composed</i>, lacking the scaling self-similarity of traditional fractals, with no repetitions whatsoever automated. This seems like a VERY interesting way to think about <i>scores</i> for me (which are, like games, <i>soundtracked</i> by the sounds mapped onto them). Dan Lopatin recently mentioned R+7's composition as 'jams inside of jams inside of jams', which is very much what happens with the overdubbing process being counted as a unit, and used as raw material in the composition of new units. What an image! This kind of SCALING jam-space seems to be a kind of music that, were it to be 'scored' with any visual representation at all, would require using a visualized <i>mereological</i> (part/whole relations) paradigm much like that of <i>Infinite Sketchpad</i>. All samplr jams are going to be "jams in jams" like this-- you put in a sample, which is itself a jam, and then you jam <i>with</i> it, and if you record, this produces another jam, which is different from both the original-object (sample) jam and the played (haptic) jam.</div>
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The relations are not so simple as that, though, and an attention to the loopiness of their sequencing introduces some of the potential for structures that can command a kind of affective disorientation/ilinx (tool for transition liquidation) as could be automated with formal-software models of playing-- counted as a videogame.</div>
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Let's say jamB is a samplr jam composed of recombined elements of jamA-- it has zoomed into some very special nooks and crannies and recomposed a piece from those components. jamC has also done the same thing, recomposed from jamA and is its own jam, its own object. Now, jamD has also been composed, and it is made from some of jamB overdubbed on top of jamC. The relations between these parts is not simply that of parts and wholes, where jamA eats up jamB, etc. Already, the relations are confused, because it is very reasonable to see that jamA is <i>in</i> jamB just as much as jamB is <i>in</i> jamA. The source material is cut, dissolved, its components constituting the makeup of the derivative. At the same time, if we are to ask what the original is composed of, it would not be incorrect to say that, <i>at least some of the components</i> are those that can be found in jamB (jamA's original source, the <i>haptic playspace</i>, lost forever to time). This is the classic Ouroboros model, popular with the Hermetics, and the Strange Loop model, popular with Douglas Hofstadter & AI folks everywhere.</div>
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But even this is not enough-- because we didn't yet think about the overdubbing, where jamD is in jamB and jamC, which are themselves reciprocally in and containing jamA, and in jamC and jamC are <i>dissolved parts</i>, irretrievable as such, from jamD. With all of these relations criss-crossing not only between parts and wholes but between jams themselves too, the mereological model, which is <i>all</i> parts and whole, ceases to do the job.</div>
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In Alfred North Whitehead's <i>Process & Reality</i> (which I have not yet read-- <i>Modes of Thought</i> is a GOOD intro, tho, P&R is very systemic, seems rough)-- he describes a metaphysical model which a <i>mereotopological </i>composition. Mereotopology accounts for, not only parts and wholes, but also <i>interconnectedness</i>-- invariance, edges… LINKS, or 'folds' in spacetime, we might think-- we might have some sense of the felt reality of this from playing <i>Portal</i> or <i>Corrypt</i>, too, or reading some D&G <i>rhizome, </i>surfing 'planes of correspondence,' or Hofstadter's other name for Strange Loops: <i>tangled hierarchies</i>.</div>
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In any case, the models of our Samplr jams paired with the Infinite Sketchpad model may come in closer to one another once relations between parts are allowed to be still more entangled-- when a whole might contain a cascade of parts, eventually containing the original whole (strange loop), when a part of a whole might contain a link to a part of another part of the same whole, or a different whole, represented by similarity (repetition/identity) of parts, and their persistent realization across space-time.</div>
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These relations sound complicated, and I probably tangled them up even more in my own thinking, but these are the concepts and structures that we're <i>presently</i> dealing with more and more when we're making music with computers today, we just have not begun to count them/visualize-- really, in practice of jamming inside other jams with other jams etc, this dizzying structure of relations doesn't really strike us as formidable at all, but rather wholly natural, like a series of rooms filled with objects we can lose ourselves in and harmonic relations between objects in the space that can be dissolved and recombined etc, resulting in slopes and currents generated by the object-centers, and transitioning points of attraction forming a dynamic substrate of structural variation that we can move through at will. The process of composition, or of improvisation, which is felt intuitively even while it is structurally dizzying, whatever, is not so very different from a videogame...<br />
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We are familiar with the composition of music objects as "pieces" (albums, tracks, etc), but not so much as touched things, or "spaces" (instruments, group dynamics, etc). Adam Harper's excellent <i>Infinite Music</i> has begun to point toward a plane of consistency where instruments, styles, mp3s are all counted as real materials to put to use in composing/playing music, which points toward a more generalized music or (<i>musick</i>) theory of PLAYSPACES as opposed to <i>works-- </i>or at least, one where works are allowed to be players, just like everything else. To fill out a model of this sort requires accounts of processes/games that are played in composition/improvisation, in order to better reconstruct a virtual image of the conditions in which the object was allowed, in the first place, to be <i>fixed</i> as it has been. Beyond this filling out the model of music space, though, which has its relevant structural correlate in exploring new kinds of videogames and how their musical aspects might 'hug' their structural beams--- beyond this, it's fun just to try <i>playing</i> some new games with music… even just cruising around in itunes, and hanging out in zones of a track that I like, rather than listening to the whole thing, practicing new kinds of repetition, and introducing variation not as accident that corrupts an original work, but as play-- beginning to compose with the materials, to make the fixed a little more fluid.<br />
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<b>C. VIDEOGAMES</b><br />
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The way I think about videogames is like this:<br />
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They're able to <i>materialize</i> and <i>automate</i> any structures taken from any games (like those above) as long as they're able to be reduced to and represented with <i>quantity</i>. A videogame can be composed as an assemblage of such structures, or a zoom into / recombination of one or another. This reduction ultimately can't account for much of the magic between organism and non-organic player that makes music MUSICK, but it <i>can MAKE</i> the non-organic player itself-- which can then be played, given meaning, in our own games, with our own rules.<br />
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I think of "videogames" as meaning: <i>space of all possible software with input/output structures, </i>which opens things up... The SOUNDTRACK has a two-faced meaning. 1) is the structure, where the soundtrack means "the music" associated with the game, which <i>does not require sonic realization</i>, but is instead realized every time the software is run, and felt in the time-structures that it makes manifest. 2) is the sound-layer or 'skin', which ought to HUG these structures, such that the soundtrack has the same relation to the game that, say, a musical instrument's sound has to its mode of operation.<br />
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Why call all in/out software VIDEOGAMES in the first place, and not just <i>software,</i> or <i>apps</i>? There's a kind of austere seriousness embedded the design philosophy of so much other software which I think is probably wise to avoid. It's not the sort of 'playful seriousness'/'serious playfulness', or LOVE, which makes things happen, but the seriousness of measured <i>utility</i> and<i> trying</i> to make things happen, which gets tangled up and too-often <i>lost</i> in the engineering process with its goals and metrics and focus groups, too caught up in the abstract <i>virtuality</i> of its materials, its mutability as number-- ignoring the vibrating material actuality, its mutability as <i>touch </i>(and ignoring, likewise, the pre-abstract virtual continuum that this touch enters into).<br />
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Many videogames seem to be guilty of these same things-- but moreso than with the ideologies that have built up around other software, it feels like there's some energy in this "GAME" idea that could give way to a design-pragmatics of non-utility, of touched materiality, new games, new forms of inorganic life.<br />
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Specifically, the idea that we <i>ALLOW THE GAME TO PLAY</i> ~~<br />
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This is, to treat the game as its own player. Videogames PLAY BACK like no other software. Things are kept out of reach, if not by challenge, simply by spatial or sequential distance. When Mario JUMPs into the air, he's unable to jump again, the jump is <i>nonsense</i>, and is not <i>counted</i> by the game, because he's in the air; different activities for different times. <i>Banjo-Kazooie,</i> on the other hand, plays differently, since Kazooie squawks and gives a second jump when jump-button is pressed again in mid-air. This simple mechanical difference opens up the whole space of SHIFTING contexts in games, where an action is not meant to be accessible at all times (which is the working value system of Photoshop, Ableton Live, other 'creative tools', etc), but rather only at given times as conditioned by the dynamic contours of the environment-- an environmental architecture which is truly FORM-FINDING.<br />
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It is remarkable how beautiful even the most apparently dull videogame can be when read as music.. the LIFE is there, from the very first gesture/movement.. For me, tuning in like this typically requires playing in silence (but w/visual feedback), and really tuning into the time-relations between events and processes.. but when the tuning-in works, there's this same sort of immersion in this structural-sensuous world that we can feel when we play music..<br />
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What's exciting for me is the potential for ANY game to be hugged with a skin-tight (or loose, for comfort) soundtrack, which helps lower the barrier of that 'tuning-in' to the game structure, such that its latent/potential musicality, which without sound requires some focus/ritual to tap into, is immediately, <i>actually</i> sensible as a surface effect of the game, all the more likely that the game might be played as music-- and, the same as this, reversed/generalized-- the more likely that new musics might be played as games.<br />
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David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-14906766830057095302013-09-11T12:48:00.000-07:002013-09-11T17:58:23.957-07:00Notes On Eric Zimmerman's "Manifesto for a Ludic Century"<div class="p1">
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<b>1.</b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Eric Zimmerman <a href="http://kotaku.com/manifesto-the-21st-century-will-be-defined-by-games-1275355204" target="_blank">just put up a new 'manifesto' on Kotaku</a>, excerpted from a book he's releasing soon, <i>The Gameful World</i>. "Manifesto for a Ludic Century" is a series of 12 propositions about the history and form of games and their trajectory as projected into the future, unpacked with a bit of commentary for each. <b>Full text below, cut with my annotations.</b></span></div>
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1.1 - The sorts of futurist impulses on display here have always been exciting to me as a speculative practice, and even despite my misgivings I think there's some truth in what Zimmerman says. This idea of "entering an era of play"-- it's a beautiful image! And it is not only in games culture that we're seeing this rhetoric tossed around--<br />
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/*<br />
there's some good precedent in <i>other play cultures</i>, too. In music, we can find similar theses in Adam Harper's recent <i>Infinite Music</i>, which makes a convincing case for replacing our concept of "music" (which is always an object) with "musicking" (which is always a <i>played</i> process, following <a href="http://jlarrystockton.com/Stocktoj/small.pdf" target="_blank">Christopher Small)</a>; further back, Jacques Attali's <i>Noise</i> presents a similar argument, that we are entering an age which has been pre-shadowed by free jazz improv practices, etc-- an age where <i>everyone is a composer</i> (the "era of Composition"). The Situationist project was a radical reading of Huizinga's play theory, an attempt, perhaps, to usher in a new era (or counter-era) of <i>radical intervention</i>-- that is to say-- <i>play, NON-SPECTACLE. </i>To this end, play tactics were developed (see <i>dérive, detournement</i>), as well as architectural speculative-constructions (games; see <a href="http://www.notbored.org/new-babylon.html" target="_blank">New Babylon</a>, especially).<i> </i> In philosophy in general, we'll see this idea show up again as a kind of mix of present-realism / future-revelation -- in Derrida's <i>freeplay</i> (or 'the structurality of structure', which closely resembles Harper's variable variability, etc.), back to Nietzsche, who writes "I do not know any other way of associating with great tasks than <i>play</i>; as a sign of greatness, it is an essential presupposition" and describes, in Zarathustra, "A New Game" (The Child becoming a dancing star), himself perhaps indebted to Schiller's own post-French Revolution play ethics (<i>On the Aesthetic Education of Man</i>) which were intended to instill in Europe an earnest appreciation of beauty, and emerging naturally from here, a pre-conscious (from love!) play ethics, a universal harmony of mankind (his "Ode to Joy" used by Beethoven describing this universal harmony "all men are brothers!").<br />
*/</div>
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In any case, we can see that <span style="font-size: large;">there is some interesting precedent for Zimmerman's claims</span>, a current of <span style="font-size: large;">play-future-Idealism</span> which is <i>not</i> limited to 'games' per se, but rather <i><span style="font-size: large;">all playspaces</span></i>, and which deserves a careful study of its own.<br />
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// <i>- - - - - - </i></div>
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Naturally, his own point of view isn't reducible to these others. But more than the above examples, it is representative of systems-love of the present tech-zeitgeist, shedding some light on a contemporary spirit of positivistic optimism we're seeing proliferate more and more in Silicon biomes all over the globe (maybe contrasting what MOMA/EXPO 1 billed as "dark optimism", <a href="http://wombflashforest.blogspot.com/2013/09/maatp-moma-ps1-expo-1-probio-water-games.html" target="_blank">as per my prior posting</a>?). Responding to this optimism, a few critical pieces ("<a href="http://www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/pessimism/califIdeo_I.html" target="_blank">The California Ideology</a>," "<a href="http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-the-cybernetic-hypothesis" target="_blank">The Cybernetic Hypothesis</a>"; thanks Bryan!) paired with some of the insider values of Jaron Lanier ("You Are Not a Gadget") might be a good places to stir-up ideas and kick off a counter-offensive..<br />
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// - - - - - -</div>
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<span class="s1">Rcall the end of the Kotaku piece, where Heather Chaplin responds to Zimmerman with a pressing question/critique of her own: </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span class="s2">"</span>Are we moving into a future in which plenty of people are logical, good at recognizing patterns, and analyzing the way things work, but in which fewer and fewer of us are able to empathize?"</span></div>
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What she calls the <i>Dark Side</i> of the ludic century--<br />
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<i>HYPER-RATIONALITY-- </i>this is really the crux of it, though I'll hold back for now on what exactly its antidote, the <i>play/practice of empathy/material sympathy,</i> might entail...<br />
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Here's the massive tension: games are both playful-irrational things and highly structural things, and integrating the reality of these apparently contradictory tendencies is maybe the most important/baffling work there is to do-- in design, theory, and play. Right now, the <i>rational</i> aspect of games is WAY over-represented. Chaplin references a binary from a neuroscientist in which the 'male' brain, systematizing, is contrasted with the 'female' brain, intuiting, empathizing. No matter how ultimately "real" such split structures are, and whatever words we choose to use-- male/female, striated/smooth, quantized/unquantized, rational/intuitive-- there is a <i>very useful</i> dichotomy here, which has nothing to do with explicit gender roles, or actual <i>essences</i> of any sort, but with real, particular ways of being. Like all dichotomies it is ultimately illusory in the <i>split/gap</i> it assumes, but this is one with <i>pragmatic applications</i> which we would do well to attend to. I suggest reading Erin Stephens-North's "Gender and Brilliance" essays (<a href="http://ellipticallydirect.com/?p=581" target="_blank">1</a>, <a href="http://ellipticallydirect.com/?p=2343#" target="_blank">2</a>) at this point-- on consistent and inconsistent creativity, and their analogs in maleness and femaleness, which are very much at the heart of the problem (the problem being the <i>lack of femaleness, inconsistency</i>). These problems are dealt with further in Alain Badiou's reading of Cantorian Set Theory (<i>Being and Event), </i>which provides ample conceptual support for a system of quantity rooted in non-quantity/inconsistency (Void). Ian Bogost has given us his own reading of Badiou, but it unfortunately does not address the idea (or <i>specter</i> in computer culture) of inconsistency, of <i>pure multiplicity</i>, that "the One is <i>not</i>", rather proceeding from that plane of consistency whereby the one has already been counted into "being" as a <i>unit</i>, and all that follows are operations on said units, on the informational-consistent plane. This, I believe, misses the major thrust of Badiou's <i>pure multiplicity</i> as well as Cantor's own maths/metaphysics. Indeed, Cantor's theory of sets posits an Absolute Infinity, infinitely more infinite than all other infinities, and necessarily <i>inconsistent</i> by nature. Cantor himself deemed his theory of hierarchical infinities a continuation of the study of <i>irrational numbers</i>, those infinitely precise <i>actualities</i> which, no matter how many times you divide a unit into 2 will always exist <i>between</i> the original unit and its divided parts.<br />
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Formally put, I believe it is <span style="font-size: large;"><b>a search for</b></span> this pseudo-structural world of<span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>inconsistency</i>, <i>irrationality</i>, & <i>infinity</i></b></span> that <span style="font-size: large;"><b>must guide our play practices today</b></span>, and our structural models that follow-- and only now, play giving rise to <i>design</i>.<br />
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//</div>
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Zimmerman's work is to be admired-- I learned a lot from <i>Rules of Play</i> (written with Katie Salen), and am really grateful for the paths of learning/thinking/playing it sent me down. But I do believe there is an imminent danger in the thinking of the present manifesto-- a danger of falling prey to the seductive tactics of reason, structure, consistency-- at the loss of <i>play</i>.</div>
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Here we go, with the manifesto, and my annotations. Zimmerman's propositions are in bold. His commentary in italics. My notes in regular (+ variation for emphasis). </div>
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<i>:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/</i></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-size: x-large;">2. EZ MANIFESTO w/ COMMENTARY</span></i></b></h2>
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<b>Games are ancient.</b></div>
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<i>Like making music, telling stories, and creating images, playing games is part of what it means to be human. Games are perhaps the first designed interactive systems our species invented.</i></div>
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The first fatal error is counting the activities of MAKING music, of TELLING stories, of CREATING images as if these processes were categorically different from PLAYING games. If games are ancient, play is even moreso, and what <i>isn't</i> played? <i>Making</i>, <i>telling, creating</i>-- these are all kinds of play, or different words for the same thing even. Can we admit to music, stories, & images being games for those who <i>played</i> them into being?</div>
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TOOL-BEING-- the "first designed interactive systems" need not be divorced from the material structure of the physical world itself-- making a knife out of a rock is itself a game in an important sense (even a Game Theoretical game with optimum 'sharpness' and 'sturdiness' conditions!), it is only because we do not account for all the forces (Rules) involved that we might consider it otherwise. </div>
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The thesis that "everything is play", that "everything is a game" (see Lila (cosmicplay), Leela (Zimmerman et. al)) is still ridiculed as if it were merely hyperbolic, a device used for rhetorical purposes but not meant to be taken seriously. We need to give this claim serious attention. Once we strip away games' requirement of explicitly stated goals (quantitative evaluative principles of 'optimum behavior'), it might seem as if we're left with nothing to hang onto -- but this is not the case, we still have <i>play, movement </i>(which is simultaneously the immanent actuality of the game in flux, <i>and its goal</i>, one and the same). </div>
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Without the 'explicit goals' requirement, everything opens up, and what we're left with is perhaps exactly what William James calls "activity situations" (Essays in Radical Empiricism), which are the grain of experiential reality (itself a game), but are by no means groundless (we're on the ground, right?). What might this new <i>ground</i> be? Planting a seed:</div>
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SHIFTING POSSIBILITY SPACES</div>
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(are ancient)</div>
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<b>Digital technology has given games a new relevance.</b></div>
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<i>The rise of computers has paralleled the resurgence of games in our culture. This is no accident. Games like Chess, Go, and Parcheesi are much like digital computers, machines for creating and storing numerical states. In this sense, computers didn’t create games; games created computers.</i></div>
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Instead: digital technology has given QUANTITY (numerical states) new relevance. This is NOT limited to "games" per se, except as considered in the broader sense of: dynamic-nondeterministic quantitative information flows. See next point. It need not be stressed that music and images are both reducible to terms of numerical states just as much as games are (and are just as dynamic during their creation processes, which <i>includes active listening</i>). The question is not that of setting games aside as the MOST relevant form as regards quantitative structure, but rather to <i>learn from games</i> about PLAY, and to tune into this play aspect of <i>all quantitative structure</i>. </div>
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This proposition ought to be re-formulated: "digital technology has effectively made all consistent quantity actualizable in the form of <i>material</i> games." Computational-information architectures are remarkable in this sense above all-- that these numerical states have become literally <i>materialized</i>, such that number is here not an ideal, but a property of 'natural' (here, electronic) force just as much as anything else (even if the infinitely precise <i>actuality</i> of irrational number is NOT accounted for, given information architectures' binary atoms which cannot be further split.</div>
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<b>The 20</b><span class="s3"><b><sup>th</sup></b></span><b> Century was the century of information.</b></div>
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<i>Systems theory, communications theory, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, computer science – these fields, many of them emerging well before electronic computers, helped create the “information revolution.”</i></div>
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<i>The abstraction of information has made possible massively complex bureaucracies and technologies, from telegraph and telephone networks to NASDAQ and Facebook. </i></div>
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Fair enough! We will find plenty of systemic examples in finance, advertising, social media, sure-- but we would do well to be weary of the palpable effects on our own thinking of what we deem important, <i>what we choose to pay attention to</i>, and how this limits our sense of possibility. </div>
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It would be a shame, perhaps unwise, to neglect the informatics at play in the arts.</div>
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Instead of setting our sights on these financial-communicational spaces of quantity where information theory has already prevailed, and which are admittedly not very positive <i>value-images</i> to follow in the footsteps of, we should <i>gently</i> apply these concepts to the realm of ideas that have henceforth seemed to be unsusceptible to strict formalization. James Tenney's <i>Meta-Hodos </i>begins to do this with music (plenty of others have as well)-- we might find useful paths, too, in what Paul Klee called his "exact approaches to art" (see his <i>Notebooks</i>), which despite their strictness, play a major role in the foundational origins of non-representational images, giving rise to any number of abstractions, including (notably) the COBRA movement, which functioned as the sort of aesthetic-tactical source of the Situatonist project (COBRA all loved Klee-- where is the information theory of his chaos-cosmos?).</div>
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<b>In our Ludic Century, information has been put at play.</b> </div>
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<i>Our information networks no longer take the form of vast card catalogs or webs of pneumatic tubes. Digital networks are flexible and organic.</i></div>
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<i>In the last few decades, information has taken a playful turn. To take a prime example, Wikipedia is not about users accessing a storehouse of expert knowledge. It is a messy, chaotic community in which the users are also the experts, who together create the information while also evolving the system as a whole.</i></div>
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Yes, Wikipedia is a game, and a very good one! What would a ludological analysis of Wikipedia look like? How many other styles of analysis might there be? Certainly network/graph theory will provide some useful tools here-- it only needs now to account for a <i>player</i>.</div>
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To this end, the concept of <i>entropy</i> in information theory should be given special priority in the study of games. Tenney's <i>META Meta-Hodos</i> ends: "there is still nothing known about structural entropies in music,"</div>
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Entropy defines those information structures which are irreducible to higher-level patterning, those structures/strings which are <i>uncompressible</i>-- which cannot be accounted for by rule, pattern, but which are necessarily <i>immanent</i> to the patterning itself, the multiple prior to the count. Entropy is that which is the 'remainder' of optimum behavior, game theory.</div>
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I believe in this total variability of entropy, <i>pure multiplicity/Chaos,</i> we might find some source of a <i>cosmological</i> meaning of Play. </div>
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PROPOSITION: a <i>player</i> (as a <i>playing thing</i>) should never be defined aside from some concept of entropy, which is the <i>inconsistent</i> (uncompressible) stream of play itself (scaling).</div>
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We should study not merely computational information theories, but return to the source-- to thermodynamics, where (a different) <i>entropy</i> originally got its name. Here, might we find something useful in Stuart Kauffman's theory of "adjacent possibility at the edge of chaos"-- something which defines games, life, material flows, music-- all in one breath? These apparently 'diverse' structures; activity-situations-- <i>counted as one</i>.</div>
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<b>In the 20</b><span class="s3"><b><sup>th</sup></b></span><b> Century, the moving image was the dominant cultural form.</b></div>
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<i>While music, architecture, the written word, and many other forms of expression flourished in the last century, the moving image came to dominate. Personal storytelling, news reporting, epic cultural narratives, political propaganda – all were expressed most powerfully through film and video.</i></div>
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<i>The rise of the moving image is tightly bound to the rise of information; film and video as media represent linear, non-interactive information that is accessed by a viewer. </i></div>
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There is a sort of fear of the moving image in games communities-- as something that apparently must be transcended (games are not movies!). But I don't understand this fear. The fact is-- <i>video</i>games still use images.. almost always. Even Doug Wilson's games which appear to be non-video videogames still rely on the movement of players in a space (visible in all cases except "Beacons of Hope" which is played in the dark).</div>
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<br /></div>
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We need to come to terms with the reality of games and the moving image, and the fact that these are by no means mutually exclusive concepts-- that the moving image, too, is a game. (And here, we will open the way for a pragmatic theory of musick as well).</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p14">
Jaron Lanier's prophecy, c. 1996: <i>"The art form of the next century is being born right now. It will be a fusion of the great arts of the 20th century: Jazz, Cinema, and Programming."</i> </div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
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<b>The Ludic Century is an era of games.</b></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
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<i>When information is put at play, game-like experiences replace linear media. Media and culture in the Ludic Century is increasingly systemic, modular, customizable, and participatory. Games embody all of these characteristics in a very direct sense.</i></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
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<i>Increasingly, the ways that people spend their leisure time and consume art, design, and entertainment will be games - or experiences very much like games.</i></div>
<div class="p11">
<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
This is accurate-- but only insofar as games are considered in a broad sense (jazz, cinema, programming, <i>at least</i>). This cannot be stressed enough. What Zimmerman says in the last sentence, "or experiences very much like games", suggests that these experiences themselves <i>will not BE</i> games, and so long as this exclusive position is common, whatever "progress" is desired will be very very slow indeed. If we think that something is not a game, then it is <i>something else</i>, and thus is apparently immune to our critiques from the spirit of play. Worse: if we believe it is other than a game, than it is not meant to be played, and <i>we have made it immune to our own play</i>. This is a horrible mistake! <i>SPECTACLE</i>. A game is just a way of playing-- a game, to use a common game design term, is a LENS, and we can wear this lens all the time (but <i>softly</i>-- watch out…).</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
For these same reasons, we MUST NOT pretend that there is a strict dividing line between games and "linear media". A line is a space just as much as anything else-- that it is only 1-dimensional should not be of concern-- have we forgotten that it is possible to map a space of any number of dimensions onto the Real number continuum? That we can keep dividing a line for as long as we like, and we'll still have neglected to make contact with ANY of the irrational numbers? That the line itself is infinite?</div>
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<br /></div>
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Have we even forgotten, more relevant to our craft, that a piece of software is itself a <i>line of information</i> (though atomic, not continuous)? That all software structure is serial-sequential (linear), just as all software sequence is structural? </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
Here is a picture of some Turing tape, to illustrate this point:</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-crNW9Lgz0BQ/UjDBhbXlk8I/AAAAAAAAAa0/3ewxZuhMpo0/s1600/busy-beaver-turing-machine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="140" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-crNW9Lgz0BQ/UjDBhbXlk8I/AAAAAAAAAa0/3ewxZuhMpo0/s400/busy-beaver-turing-machine.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p9">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="p9">
<b>We live in a world of systems.</b></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p13">
<i>The ways that we work and communicate, research and learn, socialize and romance, conduct our finances and communicate with our governments, are all intimately intertwined with complex systems of information – in a way that could not have existed a few decades ago.</i></div>
<div class="p5">
<i>For such a systemic society, games make a natural fit. While every poem or every song is certainly a system, games are dynamic systems in a much more literal sense. From Poker to Pac-Man to Warcraft, games are machines of inputs and outputs that are inhabited, manipulated, and explored.</i></div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p5">
Systems theory will talk about <i>phase spaces</i>, and this has very much to do with the concept of a <i>possibility space</i>, to the point that the two concepts can be confused, at our loss. In a phase space, a system's degrees of freedom establish a graph's dimensionality, and the lines/planes/hyperplanes traced around the graph establish the "space of all possible system states", each representing a "point" of actuality, and this has the potential to be a <i>very useful</i> concept in games--</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
However, systems theory always looks on from "the outside", the objective/'publicly verifiable' position where a given state is merely one possibility among many, and where the flows from state to state can be reduced statistically to probabilistic relationships. Game theory proceeds in this way.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
All of this is to say-- the <i>sense of possibility</i> itself is ignored. That which is fully <i>local</i> to the 'system' itself, <i>our own play</i>. Once we tune into this aspect, the system's connective flows blow open in all directions. Our own being has become connected to the system, and thus our memories join in, extending its information flows into the past, projected again into the future, the 'edge' of which ('gateway of the moment') houses the <i>sense of possibility.</i></div>
<div class="p10">
<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
There are NO CLOSED SYSTEMS. When we <i>play</i>, it is to prove this thesis, to enter into <i>connections</i> with supposedly rigid spaces, to prove that we are real agents of causality, that, despite any quantitative reductions involved, we are not a gadget, we can enter in, let chaos flow, and create the world anew. That <i>we</i> will be the conduit for the openness of the system, the channel/medium for the causal effects the game has on the world</div>
<div class="p10">
<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p9">
<b>There is a need to be playful.</b></div>
<div class="p13">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p13">
<i>It is not enough to merely be a systems-literate person; to understand systems in an analytic sense. We also must learn to be playful in them. A playful system is a human system, a social system rife with contradictions and with possibility.</i></div>
<div class="p5">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p5">
<i>Being playful is the engine of innovation and creativity: as we play, we think about thinking and we learn to act in new ways. As a cultural form, games have a particularly direct connection with play. </i></div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p5">
Yes! The real question here, though -- </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
The message that's sent from "it is not enough to be <i>merely</i> a systems-literate person" is that that systems literacy is one necessity among others. Is it really <i>necessary</i> to be a systems-literate person? </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
If this idea of 'consistent' and 'inconsistent' (male/female, structural/intuitive) creativities has some reality, need we really deem the <i>maleness</i> (structure) necessary at all? As it's written, it almost sounds as if consistency is a precondition of inconsistency-- as if Eve were born of Adam's rib (and not the other way around, as Badiou might be inclined to say). Especially at a time like now when there is a kind of <i>excessive consistency</i> at play in our medium-- is this something we want to actively foster? Might we instead just let creativity flow as it wants to flow? </div>
<div class="p10">
<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
Bret Victor is strong on this point-- so many technologist folks say artists should learn to code (for empowerment/systems literacy), but he rejects this idea. ARTISTS SHOULD NOT LEARN TO CODE (unless they desire it, of course!). Instead, fluid systems should be built for artists to PLAY. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
Playing does not need to count quantities, only to <i>touch qualities</i>.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
"YOU CAN MAKE VIDEOGAMES" -- but <i>should you</i>? </div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p9">
<b>We should think like designers.</b></div>
<div class="p13">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p13">
<i>In the Ludic Century, we cannot have a passive relationship to the systems that we inhabit. We must learn to be designers, to recognize how and why systems are constructed, and to try to make them better.</i></div>
<div class="p5">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p5">
<i>It took several decades for automobiles to shift from being a hobbyist technology requiring expert knowledge to being a locked-in consumer product. The constant change of digital technology means that our hardware and software systems may never stabilize in this way. To fully engage with our world of systems, we must all think like designers. </i></div>
<div class="p11">
<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
More importantly-- <i>we should design like players</i>. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
DESIGN is the most dangerous thing we're forced to deal with at the moment. It is the systemic process of COUNTING systems (following Badiou-->Bogost-->Harper), stripping them of the the entropic remainder of inconsistency (following Finny). There is absolutely nothing <i>necessary</i> about this process-- it is quite possible to play for a lifetime without explicit design (even though play has its own self-organizing tendencies), to achieve some beautiful things in this way..</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
Beautiful things happen in design, too, but I think only insofar as the design is <i>played</i>. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
So much more austere<i> ugliness</i> comes from design than <i>beauty</i>. All that design requires is structure, and it is easy enough to satisfy that requirement, over and over, again and again, always structural, thus always successful-- but structure without play is just ugly bureaucracy. </div>
<div class="p11">
<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
Art (play) is fluid; design is fixed. Stuart Kauffman's theory of adjacent possibility sounds like some of Manuel DeLanda's work, too-- where all matter is conceived in its <i>states</i> -- i.e. solid, liquid, gaseous water -- and where it is at the phase transitions between states (the EDGE OF CHAOS) that the immanent Creativity of the world is actualized.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
Design, then, is like ice, and art is like water-- and we have seen that, at the very least, it possible to simulate some very <i>watery things</i> on computers. Let's keep playing with the natural substances to learn more-- touching the surface of an ice cube, rubbing it a bit, pressing in heat-- gradual melts, it is possible to 'sculpt' in this way. And how long will our sculpture survive? Coming to terms with this flux is only the beginning.</div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p9">
<b>Games are a literacy.</b></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p13">
<i>Systems, play, design: these are not just aspects of the Ludic Century, they are also elements of gaming literacy. Literacy is about creating and understanding meaning, which allows people to write (create) and read (understand).</i></div>
<div class="p5">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p5">
<i>New literacies, such as visual and technological literacy, have also been identified in recent decades. However, to be truly literate in the Ludic Century also requires gaming literacy. The rise of games in our culture is both cause and effect of gaming literacy in the Ludic Century. </i></div>
<div class="p11">
<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
Now we've melted a few buckets full of ice-- our sculptures didn't last long! But we have some other materials handy, too. There are some colorful powders-- we'll throw that in one bucket to make some paint; and we have some dirt-- we'll pour that in another. Keep mixing the dirt in, watch the consistency get thicker and thicker. Once it's fairly thick-- dunk in your hands, oatmeal texture! Get it all the way up your arms, now your shoulders are almost in, too. The buckets are quite large, it turns out, so now step into the paint bucket, all the way up to your neck -- the play is about to begin -- your friends are all in their buckets, too, with different colors, different dirt-consistencies-- a big room, probably the size of one of those Boeing hangars, we're all gathered in the middle of it, in our big buckets, and we're all trying to climb out-- they're so tall, it's a proper challenge! When you pull yourself up to the ledge, the weight goes off balance, the bucket spills over, and you fall out with it. All around the room, buckets spilling-- colors, dirt, materials everywhere. The buckets were so tall, you couldn't really see what the room was made of until now, but now you can look around, and there are slopes of all kinds surrounding you-- some have water sliding down them, some have ledges that make them climbable. There are good smells all around, too, which you didn't expect, you'd been smelling your dirt for so long! Fruit trees-- that's what the smells come from. These are drippy, too, like slow liquids on a gravity slope-- the sun must be melting them! Look up, and yes, the sun is getting brighter, the fruits are turning into goo as you look, a whole pool of pulpy grapefruit juice, luckily you don't have any open wounds, so you don't think it will sting to slide down, hop in -- your friends are already there, someone was daring with their leap, so now you all know that the pulp is shallow enough not to be a drowning-danger, and you remember your coating with goo, and now you hear a shout: "you wouldn't believe it! the mixture of the dirt and the colors and the pulp all tastes really great!", and you look down at them, and are ready to hop in, but something strikes your fancy off to the left, you don't even know what yet, but it seemed curious, and so you turn around to follow it. Meanwhile the stars have come out overhead, the temperature is perfect-- you've forgotten what you were here for in the first place.</div>
<div class="p11">
<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
<a href="http://ilinxgroup.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">[HERMES SMOOTHIES]</a></div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
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<b>Gaming literacy can address our problems.</b></div>
<div class="p9">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="p5">
<i>The problems the world faces today requires the kinds of thinking that gaming literacy engenders. How does the price of gas in California affect the politics of the Middle East affect the Amazon ecosystem?</i><i>These problems force us to understand how the parts of a system fit together to create a complex whole with emergent effects. They require playful, innovative, trans-disciplinary thinking in which systems can be analyzed, redesigned, and transformed into something new. </i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
"Gamification" .. bleghh... :( … The word does have a nice ring to it, though…</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
As an alternative, how about a more <i>playful</i> means of surfing this zeitgeist: <i>soft gamification</i>. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
Hard gamification (the Normal kind) takes an activity-situation or structure of some sort and <i>stratifies</i> it, supposedly making it supposedly more 'game-like', but really just more goal-directed, metric, capable of being evaluated in terms of optimum behaviors ("addressing our problems").</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
Soft gamification <i>solves no quantifiable problems; </i>instead, it <i>poses questions</i>. It merely takes an activity/situation, and ADDS DEGREES OF FREEDOM such that it is more malleable (more PLAYED, <i>more of a game</i>). An example of this would be listening to some music in iTunes, but instead of letting it play start to end, hopping around in the middle of the piece and finding zones that you enjoy surfing, and surfing those, and relating those zones to one another, until the 'line' of the song is experienced as a multi-dimensional intensive space (Cantor mapped N-dimensions onto a 1-D line, and you can too!).</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
Soft gamification can be done like this <i>with everything</i>. It is a means of <i>working with available materials</i>, and OPENING THEM UP, finding <i>more freedom</i> in them, and finding <i>YOUR OWN goals/constraints within those freedoms.</i> </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
It can even be done in software. Here's a simple example in Processing code made with a rectangle object defined (topleft_x, topleft_y, bottomright_x, bottomright_y):</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>// rectangle object</div>
<div class="p12">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>rect(100, 100, 400, 400);</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>// rectangle object (soft-gamified)</div>
<div class="p12">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>rect(100, 100, mouseX, mouseY);</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
So simple! Just OPENING up a corner to movement. And this could be a <i>ground</i> of a theory of soft gamification, which is to say-- AFFORDING variable control to the player. "Affordance and attention" -- Richard Lemarchand spoke on this a couple years ago. Right on-- still a problem there to explore (and let's <i>explore</i> problems, not pretend to <i>solve</i> them).</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p11">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></div>
<div class="p12">
At yoga up in Berkeley, they tell you to "make your face soft", and it really does feel better that way. Focusing on the breathing, breathing through <i>all of your pores</i> (your eyes and ears, too)…</div>
<div class="p10">
<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p9">
<b>In the Ludic Century, everyone will be a game designer.</b></div>
<div class="p13">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p13">
<i>Games alter the very nature of cultural consumption. Music is played by musicians, but most people are not musicians – they listen to music that someone else has made. Games, on the other hand, require active participation.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
[Music is ALWAYS PLAYED. Even if you just hit "play" in iTunes, and your finger-contribution ends there, you keep listening, and there is a play-aspect to this to. Sometimes you walk into a club, and there's a music playing there. You can leave, you can move, you can listen. There are no exceptions to this rule of <i>music</i> <i>always playing</i>, just as there are no exceptions to the same claim about games. The task is to <i>keep playing</i>.]</div>
<div class="p10">
<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p5">
<i>Game design involves systems logic, social psychology, and culture hacking. To play a game deeply is to think more and more like a game designer – to tinker, retro-engineer, and modify a game in order to find new ways to play. As more people play more deeply in the Ludic Century, the lines will become increasingly blurred between game players and game designers.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
Anyone can practice soft gamification at any time. This is to say: you can <i>play everything</i>. If the Ludic Century is going to be a real thing, it won't be defined by everyone being a game designer, but rather <i>everyone being a player</i>-- even designers.</div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p9">
<b>Games are beautiful. They do not need to be justified.</b></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p13">
<i>This above all: games are not valuable because they can teach someone a skill or make the world a better place. Like other forms of cultural expression, games and play are important because they are beautiful.</i></div>
<div class="p13">
<br /></div>
<div class="p13">
[or rather-- because they are AFFECTING, more generally]</div>
<div class="p5">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p5">
<i>Appreciating the aesthetics of games – how dynamic interactive systems create beauty and meaning – is one of the delightful and daunting challenges we face in this dawning Ludic Century.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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I agree!</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p12">
David</div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p5">
<i>:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/</i></div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p15">
<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">3. Talk of Magickians : Post-Human Empathy & Material Sympathies in Computational Alchemy</span></b></div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
<div class="p5">
To return to the question of EMPATHY. This is a big topic-- commenters on Kotaku mention multiplayer games, single-player games with human issues, <i>Journey</i>, etc.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
Obviously there's loads of interesting stuff to be done in this vein, but I believe limiting our idea of 'empathy' to be something happening between humans or between <i>representations</i> of humans is necessarily missing out on <i>a lot</i>, perhaps not even beginning to touch the empathetic <i>grain</i> of the medium as well as we might like it to..</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
It will be instructive to recall a piece of Chris Crawford's game theories--<br />
his proposal that <span style="font-size: large;"><b>all games are multiplayer</b></span>.<br />
<br />
This is a concept which should be reinstated, as a computational pragmatics, and precisely because of the bizarre ontological consequence it entails-- which is to say that, to account for the structures of supposedly 'single-player' games like <i>Super Mario Bros. </i>(etc etc), <i>we must be open to admit every THING with causal influence on a game's outcome to be a player.</i></div>
<div class="p10">
<br />
More than "what is it like to be a thing?", I am interested in asking, playing-- "what is it like to affect and be affected by a thing?". To give ontological priority to <i>PLAYERS </i>rather than <i>OBJECTS.</i><br />
<br />
(though of course, the words mean exactly the same thing-- <i>SPACES, SUBSTANCES,</i> too-- they are all situations)<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
<i>Super Mario Bros.</i>, then, is anything <i>but</i> 'single-player.' The game software object itself is another player-- in this sense the game is 2-player, between human player, and <i>line of information</i> (game object). The line, of course, is interpreted/read by further players which form the 'skin' of the game object (that is, audio-visual output & input haptics), which is the top-level unit player, and the <i>whole</i> of the surface that the human player has access to. But even the game object information itself is, following Bogost's unit ops, not to be counted as one, but rather as a <i>multiplicity</i> of players. Each Goomba is a player, Each block type, each 'floor feel' (honey, ice, grass, etc) is also a player. Each level is a player which is composed of these lower-level players and which forms a part of the higher-level game object (player) itself.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
<span style="font-size: large;">It is always <i>between players</i> that play happens. Play is always a <i>composition</i>, a <i>mixture</i>, an <i>assemblage</i> of players. And these players need not, by any means, be human. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
Empathy, likewise, happens between players, and these players need not be human.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
We would not look kindly on someone who called himself a humanist, loving of all his fellow men, if he was also murdering & skinning cats every night. There is a common-sensical understanding of empathy that extends far beyond something existing exclusively between humans. We might feel a nagging sympathy even upon crunching a spider, a more alien creature. Of course, these are all forms of LIFE still...</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
Is it possible to feel empathy in regard to a non-human player? Is there any sense in such empathy? or is it be merely illusory?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
It cannot be illusory, because it is felt-- it is a <i>physiological fact</i>. Empathy is <i>in the belly</i>. The belly is connected at a distance to the spider, the cat, the game object-- <i>all players, all materials</i>. And, upon connecting the body with the world it is <i>in</i>, the process of computer game development begins to point toward the possibility of a new kind of computational <i>alchemy</i>. </div>
<div class="p10">
<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
The classical alchemy of history was ruled by a belief in the fundamental unity of the human soul with the order of the cosmos, and <i>all of its material actuality</i>. We can be satisfied even with the positivistic understanding of material-energetic continuity between the body and the world. The alchemical practice that was to become modern chemistry played a game ruled by the working hypothesis of <i>material sympathies-- </i>the belief that there is a real <i>affective</i> bond between compositions of chemicals (players, w/ <i>elective affinities</i>) and between chemical compositions and the alchemist herself (this is the cat-belly play at a distance). The process of 'doing alchemy' was thus simultaneously working/playing on <i>matter-energy</i> and working/playing on the <i>soul</i>. </div>
<div class="p10">
<br /></div>
<div class="p5">
The relationship here entailed is simple-- that of <i>causal agents</i> (players) in an <i>activity-situation</i> (game) defined by a scaling multiplicity of players and their interrelations (affects, 'interactions'), wholes (<i>super mario bros.</i>) and parts (goomba, koopa). This looks like Alfred North Whitehead's <i>mereotopological</i> cosmology, which might be worth digging into (<i>Process and Reality</i>, difficult; <i>Modes of Thought, </i>friendly intro)-- at least to see where Bertrand Russel's teacher and <i>Principia</i> collaborator kept tunneling when BR & everyone else's faith seemed to turn to scientific-logical positivity.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Causality</i> is the key</span>-- this is what we are implicated in, <i>we transform the world</i>, and it is what the alchemists called <i>magic</i>. Aleister Crowley's <i>magick</i> formalizes this concept for moderns as the directed action of the Will onto the world. <span style="font-size: large;"><i>Magick</i> is the more generalized <i>whole</i> of <i>musick</i>, the (ck) seems to mean: CKAUSALITY</span>.<span style="font-size: large;"> <i>Play</i>.</span> Timothy Morton recently wrote an OOO book on this (<i>Realist Magic</i>), and delivers the thesis that <i>the causal realm is the aesthetic realm</i>. The aesthetic realm is the realm of pre-conscious feeling-- of mutual affects, in and out. Nietzsche was right to critique all theories of aesthetics that approach the topic from the <i>viewer's</i> perspective-- aesthetics is only rightly approached from the perspective of <i>creation,</i> without which it cannot exist at all. And creation is IN ALL CASES <i>play between players</i>. Even 'single-player' art is-- <i>the artist and her materials</i>. Composition is the constitution of the unit player, or <i>playspace</i>, which serves as the "receptacle of becoming", the variable possibility space into which further play is delivered by way of its affective constraints and conditioning influences on play. </div>
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Play itself, in this sense of always existing as causal influence <i>between</i> players, is always magickal, musickal-- is always an immediate flow of causality, of localized flux, of <i>shifting possibility spaces</i>. Scientifically: play is <i>movement</i>, simple as that. The task is insane and unthinkable, but the "talk of magicians" is timely-- it would behoove us to begin feeling our way toward a new computational alchemy, surely unspeakable at first, which is guided by an affective sense of transforming (playing, moving) <i>quality</i> in <i>all materials</i> (ALL PLAYERS), & wholly <i>prior</i> to our structural understanding of them, even while taking into account structural quantities that can be accounted for (that which is consistent, rational, finite). <br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Pseudoscience</span> will need to be embraced. But not others'-- <i>your own</i>. Here's how: reading pop science (and proper science when it's handy!), pretending we're scientists-- <i>playing with the available materials</i>. Without something pseudoscientific to embrace in the materiality of the world as it relates to ourselves, we in this tech-culture of quantities are too in danger of being seduced by so called "science" proper, which is forever incapable of integrating inner and outer experience, no matter how much else it may be capable of. A theory of play requires such an integration. Apologies for being to be too rash, hasty or dramatic, but I believe it's possible that <i><span style="font-size: large;">a properly useful theory of play & videogames requires the composition of a 'Third Culture' as a dissolving agent/medium between the Two Cultures (of Science and Humanities)</span></i>, one which will naturally offend sciences and humanities both (offending the sciences by being pseudoscientific; offending the humanities by <i>dissolving all works of art</i> (objects, artists)).</div>
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The Hermetic tradition, source-stream of the alchemical practice, has throughout history served as just such a culture. It is a scientific practice insofar as it is concerned with the objective materiality of the world, but it is an inner practice insofar as it refuses to take the <i>finite-consistent-rational</i> logics (Positivism) as its ground. There is a dream in some formalists' sleep of a new science (more or less) of game design, but these folks unfortunately seem scared of the generative potentiality of the psuedosciences to stir up Chaos, and thus unthinkable order-- perhaps they have forgotten how often the emergence of the hard-positive sciences throughout history has been composed of more or less stratified <i>magickal</i> (causal) practices, just as the emergence of "music objects" (compositions) is always a stratification of <i>musickal</i> (improvisatory) practices. </div>
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Existing science should not be ignored. This would be to align too firmly with only one of the Two Cultures, and to miss out on so many beautiful ideas. But neither should it be taken on its own terms, which necessarily is built on the premises of what Whitehead called "the bifurcation of nature", the dualistic split between objective reality and personal experience. Science will provide new tools for magic, but it will most emphatically <i>NOT</i> provide instructions as to <i>how</i> we should use these tools-- <i>what to make</i>. <i>The causal burden is on us</i>. This is our alchemical <i>objective reality</i>. Here the practice of "material sympathies" must be admitted into our toolbox, whereby we develop an affective feel for the relations between ourselves and the materials, and between the materials in composition, amongst themselves. A Theory of Harmony, where empathy exists in shifting relations between scaling players, human and otherwise. As for an empathetic pragmatics-- we can begin this whenever/wherever, just by <i>listening</i>, and by <i>moving</i> from here. </div>
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Ending with an excerpt from Plato, whose <i>secrets</i> have been admired by the Hermetic tradition for ages. Here, a partial account of his too-often downplayed <i>musical </i> theory of justice, via harmony via motion-gymnastics (body-play, sports & games), </div>
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"The man who makes the finest of gymnastic with music and brings them to his soul in the most proper measure is the one of whom we would say most correctly that he is the most perfectly musical and harmonized … "</div>
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… and the liquefying danger of <i>too much music </i>without enough gymnasticks (music needs games as much as games need music):</div>
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"When a man gives himself to music and lets the flute play and pour into his soul through his ears, as it were into a funnel-- using those sweet, soft, wailing harmonies we were just speaking of-- and spends his whole life humming and exulting in song, at first, whatever spiritedness he had, he softened like iron and made useful from having been useless and hard. But when he keeps at it without letting up and charms his spirit, he, as the next step, already begins to melt and liquefy his spirit, until he dissolves it completely and cuts out, as it were, the sinews from his soul and makes it 'a feeble warrior' [not enough gymnasticks!].<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W0CwJYS3awU/UQXrGrNJG5I/AAAAAAAAAVs/Al6FKDl6gN4/s1600/coda.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W0CwJYS3awU/UQXrGrNJG5I/AAAAAAAAAVs/Al6FKDl6gN4/s1600/coda.png" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">4. CODA: Invitation to Dark Play:</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">"Now, to state it briefly, the overseers of the city must cleave to this: there must be no innovation in gymnastic and music contrary to the established. They must beware of change to a strange form of music, taking it to be a danger to the whole. For never are the ways of music moved without the greatest political laws being moved-- as Damon says, and so I am persuaded."</span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_87ofsdly-M/UjD-XDIV5QI/AAAAAAAAAbE/uyo9kiw6ov0/s1600/wig.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="128" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_87ofsdly-M/UjD-XDIV5QI/AAAAAAAAAbE/uyo9kiw6ov0/s640/wig.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><i></i>P.S.</span></div>
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Ian Bogost mentioned that he had backed off of Badiou in <i>Alien Phenomenology</i>. This short excerpt, which concludes his critique in that book, is a relevant transition into further studies of played inconsistency / irrationality / infinity:<br />
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"In <i>Unit Operations</i>, I offer the count-as-one not as a model for or analogue to the unit operation but as a related idea. The point is this: things are not <i>merely</i> what they do, but things <i>do indeed do things</i>. And the <i>way things do</i> is worthy of philosophical consideration. Units are isolated entities trapped together inside other units, rubbing shoulders with one another uncomfortably while never overlapping. A unit is never an atom, but a set, a grouping of other units that act together as a system; <span style="font-size: large;">the unit operation is always fractal."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Reminder of Tom Lieber's <i>Infinite Sketchpad</i>--</span><br />
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<a href="http://infinite-sketchpad.com/"><span id="goog_1742713082"></span>Infinite Sketchpad</a> (iPad)<br />
<a href="http://infinitesketches.tumblr.com/">Infinite Sketches Gallery</a><span id="goog_1742713083"></span><br />
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Probably the best software that has been released on the iPad, grandmas and luddites all seem to love it. Remarkable magical-<i>material</i> means of studying (IN PLAY) some classic <i>problems</i> of metaphysics-- of parts and wholes, continuity/discontinuity, movement/causality, etc-- all this, just visual-haptic, prior to the intervention of language. I have been working on an essay of what I've learned from <i>Infinite Sketchpad,</i> and I hope to post a draft soon.<br />
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Also see:<br />
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<a href="http://www.smudgedcat.com/infinitedoodle.htm">Infinite Doodle</a> (David Johnston, PC/XBOX)<br />
<a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/29654821/Doodal.swf">Doodal</a> (Neil Thapen, Web)<br />
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Also see:<br />
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<a href="http://www.cosmicplay.net/">cosmicplay.net</a> - (Karen Pohn's play cosmology)<br />
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We will need to take that zoomed claim of Bogost's to heart, and to tunnel into this, to really develop the capacity for <i>zooming</i> in so many different ways.... And what do we know of Badiou's <i>event</i>? is it not fractal, too? I'm skipping ahead in the book, but:<br />
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<i>"I term EVENT of the site X a multiple such that it is composed of, on the one hand, elements of the site, and on the other hand, itself</i>"<br />
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David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-71089853546493607292013-09-11T11:51:00.001-07:002013-09-11T11:51:57.434-07:00MaaTP @ MoMA PS1 EXPO 1 ProBio Water Games<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9ujbMKSLQ9k/Uirp0TpyCNI/AAAAAAAAAaQ/Sr9eYF_0x6M/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-09-07+at+1.54.20+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="387" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9ujbMKSLQ9k/Uirp0TpyCNI/AAAAAAAAAaQ/Sr9eYF_0x6M/s640/Screen+Shot+2013-09-07+at+1.54.20+AM.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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Last Sunday, I was in NYC for MoMA PS1's EXPO1 exhibition, where Proteus was shown/played in a little movie theater for a few hours & where I then gave a presentation/had a fun piano conversation with Jamin Warren on music as touch / <i>haptics</i>. Thanks to Kevin McGarry & Jamin for having me out!</div>
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The talk wasn't recorded, but here are the slides we moved through:</div>
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<a href="http://davidkanaga.com/images/music-haptics-moma.pdf" target="_blank">HI-RES PDF (20 MB)</a><br />
<a href="http://davidkanaga.com/images/music-haptics-moma2.pdf" target="_blank">LO-RES PDF (0.6 MB)</a><br />
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(Sorry for the bizarre gap between qualities-- this was the only thing I could figure out quickly to avoid 20mb only)</div>
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Also saw the <a href="http://www.momaps1.org/expo1/module/probio/" target="_blank">ProBio</a> show there (tho didn't capture the little vacuum-robots all over the floor, which I guess had been taken out early) and some great rain / bubble activity-- made a vid of the trip:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/7tPAOYXxNuI" width="640"></iframe>
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And a bigger version of the exhibit description, with some interesting post-humansm/new materialism/inorganic life stuff going on... 'non-new-media' computer activity parallel to videogames, lots to be inspired from here, screens submerged in water & dirt, etc.<br />
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<br />David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-89378629362201807652012-11-16T18:32:00.002-08:002012-11-16T18:32:59.226-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-30608530317292469182012-09-11T00:03:00.001-07:002012-09-11T00:03:33.395-07:00Soundtracks 2: Methods<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">Interface and Dimensionality in Music Spaces</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-large;">C</span><span style="font-size: large;">ontinuing from <a href="http://wombflashforest.blogspot.com/2012/06/played-meaning-concerning-spiritual-in.html">"Played Meaning"</a></span> -- </i><i>How are values generated in play when we're not given explicit goals to pursue? One way: engagement with material presence and its variability. </i><i>Sound, image, touch, interface, feedback-- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanence">IMMANENCE</a> -- chaotic movement of emerging and collapsing possibilities. </i><br />
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<i>Boundaries, whether goals or materials/actuality are-- constrained possibilities.</i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">Practical applications</span> of this idea to <span style="font-size: large;">music design</span></i><br />
<i>--seeking<span style="font-size: large;"> fluid spaces--</span></i></div>
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<i>with </i><i>new soundtracks for:</i></div>
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<i>Super Mario Galaxy</i></div>
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<i>Assassin's Creed</i><br />
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<i>Psychonauts</i><br />
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<b><i>1 - Super Mario Galaxy Ballet</i></b></h3>
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<b><i>2 - Dogma 1</i></b></h3>
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In "<a href="http://wombflashforest.blogspot.com/2011/07/soundtracks-1.html">Soundtracks 1</a>" I suggested this rule for composing game soundtracks: </div>
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<i>For every change of state [process, event] in a game, there should be a corresponding change of state in its soundtrack</i>.</div>
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Interactive <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MickeyMousing">mickeymousing</a> -- first guideline for a musical-cybernetic realism, systemic representation of the idea that every change of state in the perceived world is itself a movement of energy, vibration. Vibrations, material variability-- light, sound, touch, & movements of consciousness, moods, ways of being.<br />
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If a soundtrack adheres to this dogma, it can be considered realistic.<br />
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Searching for grounds of this new realism-- basins of attraction, affinities and repulsions in our played experience of the game space, leaving behind Dogma 1:</div>
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<b><i>3 - Musical Dimensionality</i></b></h3>
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A realism of movement-as-creativity-- vibrational play in fluid possibility spaces. Games-- play in possibility spaces. Games best represent creative reality by becoming fluid--using continuous variables (i.e. range 0 - 100.) as opposed to constants (i.e. 23) or booleans (1 or 0)---and by becoming perceptibly vibrational, with sound and light and touch feedback.<br />
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The structures of sound feedback, music, with their relationships and meanings emerging in play, seem to have a curious relationship to the play of fluid systems more generally.<br />
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<i>Games as objects in motion >> Music as objects in motion >></i></div>
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The way the experience of music dissolves the discrete relationships between sound objects and events is a useful mental model for designing (and playing in) shifting possibility spaces.<br />
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Music objects: note, mp3, chord, A-section, B-section, voice, guitar, fermata, melody, reverb, granulizer, [cos~], etc. These objects are not static-- rather, they're defined by variables, little worlds of objects making up the bigger objects.</div>
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The melody went up, but it just as well could have gone down. The chord was a C <i>major</i>, but it just well could have been a c <i>minor</i>. The mp3 was played at normal speed but it could have been 50% speed. The Eb could have been an F. The magic circle is elastic, pulled and twisted when its boundaries are engaged. All of the objects themselves are defined by variable qualities-- possibilities. As such these objects might better be understood as spaces. Music is the organization of these shifting spaces.<br />
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Like in a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space">phase space</a>, which maps relationships between variables in a system (<i>above-- 2 and 3 dimensional phase spaces</i>), representing a musical space will require 1 dimension per variable.<br />
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Western music notation is a 2-dimensional plane-object (page) with further embedded dimensions at lower levels (> staff > symbols).<br />
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The staff object-- horizontal dimension represents time, and vertical dimension represents the present moment, pitch information:<br />
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Object-types placed on the staff are themselves variables or spaces. A fermata means hold, but doesn't say how long-- it's an open space. An eighth note is a selection from the class of note-heads and -tails (whole note, quarter note, eighth note, etc.), which determines the duration of the note. The class of clef (treble, bass, alto, etc.) determines how the staff is mapped to actual pitch-values. We can describe any musical object as a space and/or a position in a space-- an object / a component of an object. The categories are not rigid-- determining the members of a class is a compositional choice.<br />
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As flat visual information, the language of musical symbols also exists in a 2 dimensional space, but at a lower level than the staff (which, again, is one level lower than the page). The symbols are the objects which play on the staves, which are the objects which play on the page. The vertical and horizantal dimensions of symbols don't measure anything in particular, they just offer a space for the symbolic images to be constructed in.<br />
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Music is N-dimensional. Pitch, rhythm, texture, harmony, all of those symbols above, variability of sound in response to the space it's reflecting against, etc etc and more-- are often all in motion simultaneously-- sequences of events and processes weaving shifting spaces of meanings-in-motion. Being in motion, they all need variables to be described (at least 1 each), and to map the changes to all of these variables, we would need to decide how many variables there were, and make a phase space in that many dimensions.<br />
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This is an impossible project on a 2-d cartersian-XY plane, so we need to look for different representations of dimensional movements and relationships.<br />
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Western music notation's stacked dimensionality (page > staff > symbols) is a great solution given the constraint of the page as a static space. Dimension 3 embedded in dimension 2 embedded in dimension 1.<br />
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And its potential for layering musical information is very powerful, allowing for the emergence of new complex objects built from symbol and staff units. Layering staff-planes vertically (a higher level of 2-dimensionality, containing the first), Western notation allows for simultaneous play by multiple voices (players), each its own contained space of other spaces in motion, and thus emerges the fluidity of texture, shifting relationships between what objects are present and what they're doing:<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-A6p7qfa-Vek/UEu8EzXiKsI/AAAAAAAAAUc/didtUtNiDt0/s1600/RiteOfSpring-Dudki.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-A6p7qfa-Vek/UEu8EzXiKsI/AAAAAAAAAUc/didtUtNiDt0/s320/RiteOfSpring-Dudki.jpeg" width="295" /></a></div>
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<i>from "The Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky</i></div>
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There's a lot going on there, including many composite-objects that have emerged from a lower level-- like harmony (emerges from layered pitch) and textural qualities, like which players are playing in unison with one another (emerges from layered staves). Some emergent objects are more intuitively represented by the notation than others. For instance, in the above image, you can see from the shaped paths of symbols on staves that the fourth staff from the top and the second staff from the bottom are playing in unison (rhythmically, at least)-- texture is seen to be communicated fairly intuitively. Harmony, on the other hand, we have little chance of decoding from this distance-- and even once we zoom in, the system of #s and <i>b</i>s doesn't represent very well the fluid centers of gravity/tonality which give the vibrational presence of the sound its meaning.<br />
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The game of classical music theory/analysis is an attempt at systematic decodings of musical spaces like these. Creating systems of harmonic, motivic, structural (etc) objects and their interrelationships. There's likely a lot to learn here, though all too often analyses are primarily concerned with pitch/harmonic information and discrete-structural chunks, the fixedness of the objects, avoiding the more difficult but also more interesting task of finding ways that fluidity emerges from shifting relationships between objects playing in dimensionalities across all hierarchical levels.</div>
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How we describe musical possibility spaces is an implied project in musical instrument design, music theories, notations-- all musical interfaces, which could be analyzed in terms of their stacked dimensions, as one way of identifying nodes of connectedness and paths of movement.<br />
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Graphic scores offer new ways of navigating the 2-dimensional plane (page) of musical information, often by being less systematically precise (but more visually evocative), so that object relationships can emerge in play with more fluidity, an important precedent of games/fluid visual systems -as-movement.<br />
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<i>from "Treatise" by Cornelius Cardew</i></div>
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Videogames are musical interfaces. And, being <i>dynamic</i>, they're of particular interest, re: fluidity. What was was possible at one moment isn't at the next-- possibilities shift. The information, and space, we're given at one moment is gone the next. Like pages and staves and symbols coming and going, morphing and transforming, in games dimensional-crossings open and close in real time, a new detail pulling us down into a lower level, another pulling us across dimensions, another shooting us back up to the higher-level object made of those component objects, and up and up and down and across until the dimensions dissolve into pure movement, pure nowness-- the game itself in the world, our being-in-the-game in the world.<br />
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<b><i>4 - Psychonauts Walkthrough</i></b></h3>
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<i>Psychonauts + </i>new score >> mental model of motion-creativity-- walls of a psychedelic (psychê-dêlos / <span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;"><i>ψυχή-</i></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;"><i>δηλος</i> </span>meaning <i>mind-manifesting)</i> space, coloring ways-of-being with the shifting moods of sense-possibility.<br />
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Screen as a visual interface for musical play, much like a Western score, but these possibilities slide, they are not fixed. Movement between dimensionalities here is equated to alternation between different modes of play, engagement of different variables.<br />
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<i>So-- </i>pseudo-algorithms, a verbal/written score, the kind of discretization of fluidity that will be needed to implement a music space like this in code. How can music be designed (fixed) fluidly? :<br />
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(:00) - Grinding on a handrail. Automated linear movement in one of two directions, left or right. Loop's playback direction switches based on left (reversed) or right (forward). Switching direction plays melodic event sounds, scale intervals 5, 1.</div>
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(:08) - Camera cuts to new perspective, in same room as the avatar. Cut is accompanied by arpeggiated sound event, introduction of fluid room motif. Changing directions also triggers changes from the room's dimension of the sound space.</div>
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(:14) - Sliding down ramped handrail. Handrail loop material is pitch-shifted up a whole step, +2 semi-tones. Bell-shaking event plays along with slide.</div>
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(:15) - Landing event, dimension of room motif, new key having been introduced by sliding down the handrail. Handrail loop and bell-shakes fade out.</div>
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(:16) - Footsteps are accompanied by diatonic scale tones in the new key. Room motif accompanies loosely.</div>
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(:21) - "eyes opening", arpeggio up.</div>
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(:23) - running on platform, motor rhythms accompanying run-tempo.</div>
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(:29) - hop off platform, no sound "effect", instead introduction of a new harmonic rhythm, which stays around for 2 seconds while the avatar is obstructed from the camera by the wood of the platform.</div>
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(:32) - flute ornamentations enter, accompanying flight of butterflies on the screen.</div>
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(:37) - bright tinkly sound fades in, accompanying shiny object past the fence.</div>
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(:39) - jumping stops motor rhythm. jumps cycle through an array of chords. Extra triangle ding accompanies sphere-effect jump.</div>
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(:42) - volume swells briefly while spinning over fence. then we hear a mixture of walk and jump motifs for a few more seconds</div>
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(:44) - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilinx">falling</a>, <a href="http://ilinxgroup.bandcamp.com/">ilinx</a><br />
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How might this have sounded if we played differently / went someplace else? Playing with the touch of the controller, do some musical interactions seem more compelling than others? Which of the game's mechanics weren't scored & how might they have been scored?<br />
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What would verbal/pseudo-code event-scores for the two preceding videos (Mario Galaxy Ballet, Assassin's Creed) look like?<br />
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<b><i>5 - Practice</i></b></h3>
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The practice of scoring game mechanics with music that aims for a 1:1 relationship with them is still not very common. My hope is that the above examples begin to demonstrate that games-as-music are entirely possible, and not even particularly difficult to explore conceptually, when built on the foundations of the above rule of corresponding state-changes (music-game), which of course can, and ought, to be broken (but considered a rule nonetheless).<br />
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The rest of the rules we follow or push are supplied by a game's mechanics themselves.<br />
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We need to open ourselves to games' existing played time-structures. A common approach to making music games is to introduce a system of quantized timing (even subdivision of flow into time-units, often measured as a sixteenth-note pulse), so that the music grooves automatically, plays with a steady beat. But most games don't play like this. Nor does most music. Our systems of musical representation (i.e. the 16-step sequencer) suggest that music is quantized, but this is only the case in some virtual spaces. In played-actuality, music is smooth, even when it tends toward even subdivision. Don't be afraid to turn off quantization-- open up to response structures, emergent rhythms, these are games' best friends.<br />
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<i>from "De Kooning" by Morton Feldman--</i></div>
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<i>timing system based on response rather than subdivision</i></div>
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If a game being scored has even an average interaction density, the compositional process of designing its soundtrack according to the music-game rule of corresponding change will involve creating and manipulating <i>many many</i> music objects. Most composers are used to composing full pieces made of smaller units-- such processes will need to be redirected here. The smaller pieces, or <i>modules,</i> are what's needed content-wise, the "full" piece being the space of possible movement itself, the music design, which might resemble a more detailed version of the <i>Psychonauts</i> walkthrough (i.e. <a href="http://www.4-33.com/scores/cobra/cobra-notes.html">the rules for John Zorn's "Cobra"</a>).<br />
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Many objects seem to want to stay fixed (like recorded music), but they will need to move if they're to be plaeyd. Find tactics for penetrating into objects and dissolving them into their components and their potential for played variability. Build notes, motifs, textures, loops, processes. Build events from these, sequences, liquid stories. New game object? New story. Composition will need to happen so frequently and quickly, it would be good to develop an improvisational relationship to it, being able to compose without stressing about doing anything well, just playing in whatever the most efficient and fun way might be. <i>Not a full orchestra</i>, unless there's a well thought-out strategy developed to dissolve its unity.<i> </i>Want an orchestra? Whatever MIDI sounds should do you just fine, or use samples-- modules can easily be cut and shaped from existing recordings, and there's loads of music in the public domain filled with amazing sampleable bits. Don't let "it's too much work" be an excuse to not fill out music designs, just be lazier about it, automate the work, <i>play</i> it always. The content doesn't matter too much anyway-- it's how it moves.<br />
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To practice designing music in this way, more videos like the above could be made using the same technique-- music design without even having to touch code, like scores without a performance. At every change of state, we face interesting compositional decisions to play out, possibilities to navigate, movement in so many undiscovered dimensions. We could make games like this forever. <a href="http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2012/08/you-can-make-videogames.html">Yes, You Can Make Games</a>, but don't think you have to touch programming to do it-- just keep moving.<br />
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<i>6 - Dissolving Composition, Instrument, & Notation in Play</i></h3>
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When a soundtrack is subject to the variability of a game's mechanics, the music itself becomes a mechanic, an instrument-- music to be played. And the fluid space that houses this mechanic becomes a space for the play of instruments, a composition-- again, music to be played.</div>
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Spaces hold other spaces which in turn hold others, and so the hierarchical relationship between instrument and composition which says that the former is a component object used in the latter can be dissolved, reversed. Now a composition can be a component object of an instrument. The screen is the "page" displaying the fluid notations that allow for interfacing with the space-- notations which themselves are instruments built of compositions forming instruments, opening new notational dimensional-movements, and so on. This is a music space.</div>
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The space of all games-as-music is no less infinite than the space of all music itself-- in play, the two spaces are one.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">some good books for</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">>> continuing </span></i><i><span style="font-size: large;">fluid music/playspace research:</span></i></div>
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<a href="http://www.zero-books.net/books/infinite-music">"Infinite Music"</a> by Adam Harper is full of great stuff about music as object & space. The practical applications of the object-oriented music theory it describes are endless. Harper's blog post <a href="http://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2012/06/musical-radicalism-beyond-sonic-talk-at.html">"Musical Radicalism Beyond the Sonic"</a> is related, and it's about "music without sound," which could just as well be a description of the played time-structures of games-without-soundtracks.<br />
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<a href="http://www.around.com/chaos.html">"Chaos"</a> by James Gleick is a great introduction to chaos which a lot of people have read, but if you haven't-- it's a window into lots of inspiring ideas about self-organization, great models for understanding emergent playspaces. In music spaces, the organization of objects requires some amount self-organization around the player as a chaotic agent-- played emergence. Some of the concepts explored in this book, like attractors (the swirly things which i used phase-space images of throughout) and state-transitions (i.e. solid -> liquid -> gas) seem like they might be useful structural units for shaping shifting gravities and tendencies of fluid possibilities that define a space. The book also introduces some ideas from topology, which is a geometry(ish) of elastic spaces in n-dimensions (like music) and thus likely applicable to all of this-- new models of dimensionality. Also part of the "Gleick's Chaos" brand-- <a href="http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/chaos.htm">this software,</a> which supposedly works in dosbox, but I couldn't figure out how.<br />
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And-- <a href="http://aaaaarg.org/login">Gilles Deleuze-as-playground</a>: start anywhere and swim, movement in the spaces of motion-image/time-image, plane of immanence, nomadology, smooth vs. striated time, the actual and the virtual, difference & repetition-- concept-modules in an alternate theory of play-as-movement that values the always-now of forever-change over controlled behavior governed by false belief in the fixedness of objects. -- As chaotic agents in the played systems we're describing, the need for an ethic of creativity and movement emerges, and there's a project here to discover one in play--<br />
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About this-- from <a href="http://richardpayton.pbworks.com/w/page/12580685/Preface%20to%20Anti-Oedipus">the preface </a>to Deleuze & Felix Guattari's <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus">Anti-Oedipus</a></i>, Michel Foucault writes:<br />
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<i>"</i><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.5px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>[one is led] to believe it is all fun and games, when something essential is taking place, something of extreme seriousness: the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives."</i> </span></span></div>
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David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-20903160866891770592012-08-10T16:26:00.000-07:002012-08-11T11:37:47.320-07:00@-dance w/EXO \\ Tabor Robak & Gatekeeper<div class="p1">
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<i>EXO</i> just came out. <a href="http://e-x-o.com/">Download</a>-- it's FREE. A 35 minute game by Tabor Robak, set to the album of the same name by Gatekeeper. It's part of a dispersed visual project-- the <a href="https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sugexp=les%3B&tok=xry8sezZiy7POJugZEFkYA&cp=12&gs_id=1b&xhr=t&q=gatekeeper+exo&safe=off&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&biw=1279&bih=631&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=IqElUO23JMjNiwLJl4GYCw">album artwork</a>, the game, and <a href="http://www.mediafire.com/?o15y5htghb6465b">a font</a>.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="http://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F52402045&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true&color=ff4100" width="100%"></iframe>
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Robak says (quoting from <a href="http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/14170/1/gatekeeper-enter-the-void">this</a> feature):</div>
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“Everybody’s making music videos, so it’s time to figure out what the next thing is [...] I think novelty in general is a universally good force that should always be pursued. Newness [...] There’s a real saturation of [audiovisual] work. This idea was a way to set ourselves outside of that a little, with a new thing that didn’t already have a set of established ways to judge it.” </div>
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EXO continues the evolving tradition of designed musical playspaces. Recent excursions by popular electronic musicians into the form-- Brian Eno's <i>Bloom, </i>Bjork's <i>Biophilia</i>, Oval's <i>ovaldna player</i>, etc. Also, the broader tradition of flexible music in general, like improv software by Anthony Braxton, George Lewis and David Behrman, game pieces by Zorn, Cage of course.. notations (Beck's forthcoming "future of the album", <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2012/08/09/beck-s-new-album-is-sheet-music.html">sheet music</a>)</div>
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It also continues, maybe unknowingly but still more directly and self-consciously, a <a href="http://notgames.org/">notgames</a> DIY-realism trend exemplified by<i> </i>thechineseroom's <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1944729625" style="font-style: italic;">Dear Esther</a><i> </i>and <a href="http://tale-of-tales.com/">Tale of Tales'</a> many games, with their preference for detail in content over that which emerges from mechanical variety or <a href="http://doougle.net/articles/In_Celebration_of_Low_Process_Intensity.pdf">process-intensity</a>. And the broader tradition of Hollywood and the AAA games industry, who we inherited these values from (<a href="http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html">teal & orange)</a>.</div>
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Not surprisingly, some things in <i>Exo</i> are unique and exciting, others not so much.<br />
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It's visually enchanting. Vibrant palettes coloring a wide variety of future-primitive environments from digi-space scenes to deserts to oceans to floating islands and Bioshock-esque jungle-hallways with screens.. lots of melting and spraying and pulsing. The album's PR blurb describes the game's attitude well-- "Pineal activation. IMAX phantasy. Drippy acid ecosystems. HD... everything." Cheeky psych-corporatism via techno-capitalist realism -- Hi-fi is the new underground.</div>
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“It’s definitely a response to the popularity of lo-fi five years ago and also the proliferation of affordable high-definition technology,” says Robak. “Everybody’s got high-definition TV. The basic MacBook now is a pretty good computer [...] What HD means to me [laughs]<i> </i>is a commitment to quality and a level of detail.”<br />
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To produce some of this detail, Gatekeeper have revealed that they used Hollywood sound effect libraries for the album, those meticulously designed sounds that fill the whole frequency spectrum so elegantly-- these sounds that used to be the exlusive property of money, and now they're READY-MADE. Robak, likewise, says he uses texture/object packs to skin his virtual environments (<a href="http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/aug/8/artist-profile-tabor-robak/">Rhizome profile</a>). In the culture of games, we're made to believe that a visual spectacle of this sort requires heroic bunches of money and man-hours. <i>Exo asks-</i>- why not just sample and process, reuse?<br />
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So, it looks-- and in play:</div>
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Robak has directed music videos in the past, and the rhythm of movies seems to have had an awkward but not totally negative impact on <i>Exo</i>'s qualities<i> </i>as a playform. It's an "exploration" game, but one in which we're automatically "cut" from space to space every minute or so, like in a strange dream or travel documentary, no sense of connectedness between the environments. </div>
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As a viewer, we're kept engaged for the most part. As a player-- no longer any sense of agency in the spaces aside from the forever-moment of <i>motion</i> itself, moving and looking. This is the most recent of what Baiyon calls a "just walking game". And once we accept the value-space of these minimal mechanics, we move on and into them.</div>
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At this point the game becomes like a dance. Once we get used to the strange rhythm, the arbitrary force of transportation becomes like a partner for us and we're freed to experience time <i>as time</i>, space-as-time now limited from the top-down. That is to say, the sense of <i>discovery</i> in an environment is a kind of temporal installation of event-signposts and a way in which we recognize space's temporal dimensions. In <i>EXO</i> we more or less hand over control of discovery to Robak.</div>
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There is strangely a greater sense freedom here compared to, say, <i>Dear Esther,</i> which is set in a large connected space, but which also limits spatial movement with the comparatively manipulative device of <i>the path</i> (explicit and implicit, we're <i>told</i> what to do rather than just being given variable control in a constrained space). Gone is the possibility of discovery-in-space, and so, again-- discovery happens in time. This is like the experience of playing music: every key press and movement of the camera must feel meaningful, the motion itself, or we'll quit.<br />
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Now, the play grew tiring for me about 15 minutes in. The music is exciting, but its intensity is overbearing when sustained for so long in an environment that doesn't listen too closely. The tension between music and play is interesting for a while, but it ultimately falls into a pattern of predictability and unresponsiveness. We're no longer dancing <i>with</i> but <i>at.</i></div>
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This is related to another experience I've had with Gatekeeper. There seems to be a nasty trend in parts of culture, particularly in fashionable clubs-- dancing <i>AT </i>the spectacle on the stage, everyone facing the same direction, and not moving too much, lest they knock into someone or look improper. This is what it was like when I saw them live a few months ago. It's a disappointing way to listen to dance music, which asks our bodies to become one with the space, sounds, and with each other. We're confronted with images and we've been conditioned by them to look forward and submit-- even when we're <i>in music</i>, which is all around us. </div>
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In <i>Exo</i>, what starts as an interesting tension between the fluid and the fixed, play and cut, becomes tiresome once we've gotten used to its repetitions. If the rhythm of the cuts was more variable, maybe this would have felt different, or maybe even if the static music track itself changed more.. admittedly, there's a redemptive climax at the end during the final track, a quick splashy recapitulation of all the spatial motifs, transformed, melting now. But...<br />
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Variation, change, dissolve-- these things are missing <i>in the structure of the playspace</i> for the most part. Structural elements: transition-forms, speeds, object properties: our own variables<i>, assets</i>, must be given over to the same process of flow and re-use to which Robak and Gatekeeper have subjected the ready-made assets of the cultural commons in their sampling. A psychedelic realism, of process and change, hinted at in some of the moods here, must replace the object-obsession of capitalist realism/psych-corporatism that we're given instead.</div>
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One direction >> For a just-walking game: WALKING SPEED is the fundamental variable source of emergent rhythm, along with look-speed. It determines how quickly objects move on the screen-- as they grow from small to large and move past us, a visual pulse is established. Walking speeds change in <i>EXO, </i>and occasionally they feel right, but they tend to be too slow, working neither <i>with</i> nor <i>against</i> the rhythm of the music, but again--<i> at</i> it. //<br />
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And finally, <i>Exo</i> as music game:</div>
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The soundtrack's implementation is static, suffering from the same alienated attitude to the relationship between music and play that we've come to expect in so many of these pop-game projects, like Pitchfork/Killscreen's recent INTEL <a href="http://soundplay.pitchfork.com/">Soundplay</a> stuff, that assume a fixed soundtrack is enough. The guiding question here: games function like music videos? As a simple answer to this question, <i>Exo</i> works. It's the dance idea-- we can dance even to music that doesn't bend to our wills, right? True to a certain degree, and in many ways I enjoyed the direction of freedom in the game more than I did the live performance (and both as dances).. but something is lacking...</div>
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In successful engaged-performance, musicians have always responded to the energy of the dancers-- there is a feedback relationship here, as there is between musicians playing with one another. Feedback is a <i>structural necessity</i> in meaningful music-making. In fixed media, like a music video, the feedback relationships have been frozen, contained to static values in the forms themselves, and they leave us no affordances to further engage them (though they're playback mechanisms do so). The production of such forms involves feedback between audio and visual information, moderated by our own desires, and this is something we've become pretty good at.</div>
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In open forms, where dynamic variables are in play, to neglect to allow the sounds to take part in that variability (which we've already become pretty good at doing with visuals) is a mistake, and a common one. As a tension, it can be powerful, but there must be a release-- an expansion to counter the contraction-- if there's going to be any movement toward the space of <i>harmonies of change</i>. </div>
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Automated musical change is possible here, and it will be useful. Sounds tied to spaces and events and processes, allowing us to engage <i>in play</i> once again with our music. The process isn't too difficult, in fact just a continuation of that bricolage and coding work that's already been started, now using variables to control musical parameters in real-time. It wouldn't be difficult to cut the album tracks into loops and event sounds, 303s and beats and hollywood sound effects, game events triggering playback, volumes changing, maybe pitches, too. Already-- a whole new world of possibilities, and we're only beginning. The spaces themselves will need to be musical of course, and the music spatial, liquefying those distinctions-- but this isn't an impossible challenge by any means, and both the spaces and music of Robak/Gatekeeper are already inclined in these directions.<br />
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This edit of <i>Exo</i> (sounds only) is an example of how samples from the album could be repurposed for use in a highly dynamic playspace. It was made with only three processes: cutting samples (changing start and end times), pitch-shifting them, and rearranging them in a layered, multi-channel space.<br />
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We can imagine that each chunk of audio in the picture (which is the pre-mixdown arrangement layout of the soundcloud track above) is triggered by a game event, either in play or automated, and that this particular sequence was only one of many possible realizations. Deciding how the start positions and pitch-shiftings could be determined by game events would be an interesting space to work in. And this is without manipulating volume, even, or having access to component objects, like solo 303s or sfx or hihats. There are a lot of possibilitites. This example is a very simple design of what things could be like.<br />
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Hi-fi is the new lo-fi, and this is a gift to the commons-- the continuing project of opening ourselves to <i>everything</i> as a material... a gift<i>-- so long as it doesn't stay put</i>. Fashions come and go-- this sound as a "now" thing will be gone soon, but the trajectory along which it's a point will stay in motion.<br />
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The sooner we get to the point of seeing/hearing things for <i>what they are</i> rather than what they're trying to be-- the better. <i>All</i> sounds as the space we're playing in. All images and structures, too.</div>
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<i>Exo</i> brings us face to face with tensions that have the potential to lead us in this direction. Keep moving. When we can play <i>Dear Esther</i> and see that it's greatest charms are in its imperfections, an uncanny-realism with proudly-virtual spinning sprites-- then we've begun to arrive at the right place, an awareness of the actuality of form. </div>
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When HD has become easy, ready-made, how does professionalization defend itself against the amateurs, bricoleurs? It can't-- ultimately, this is the project of the dissolve of the object and static values, becoming an infinite space of pure possibility and motion for us all. Again-- as long as we stay in motion.<br />
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<br /></div>David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-19319321967477673392012-06-16T01:15:00.001-07:002012-06-16T01:15:13.718-07:00Played Meaning (Concerning the Spiritual in Games)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There has been talk recently about the word "game" and what it ought to mean. Some would like it to mean something very rigid, like Salen & Zimmerman's definition: "a game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome." They see a value in this tradition. Others would like the meaning to be more fluid. By comparing the above with even just one more definition, Roger Callois', "an activity which is essentially: Free (voluntary), separate, uncertain, unproductive, governed by rules, make-believe", we can get a sense for the amount of necessary "tradition" that's actually at stake here-- almost none. These meanings are fluid, generative, subjective.</div>
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Now: a <i>game</i> is something that we play. A <i>videogame</i> is a digital playspace.</div>
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Why can't we use another word to describe playspaces in general, and thus preserve <i>game</i>'s goal-oriented meaning? Because we are content with using the word "videogame" to define this form, at least for now. And videogames aren't even games in the "formal" sense of the word. They tend to be composite forms. Of what? Activities, toys, instruments, sandboxes, etc... ("games", too). Our intuitive understanding of what a videogame is and can be has eliminated the usefulness of <i>game</i>'s sanctified definition in our present circumstances (whether or not they qualify as "games" in the formal sense, SimCity, Electroplankton, etc. certainly qualify as videogames). "Game" is also now used as a convenient shorthand for <i>videogame</i> or <i>computer game</i>, and other playspaces that resemble those. What we used to enjoy calling a game (i.e. Salen & Zimmerman's formal definition): Shawn McGrath's new term for this is "fucking game." "Math game," or "competition," or "school" are other possible alternatives.</div>
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<span class="s1">A <i>game</i> is something that we play. A <i>videogame</i> is a digital playspace. This is the shape of games to come. </span>To impose stricter definitions will only serve to stifle creativity and unnecessarily celebrate past trends in favor of present and future possibilities-- this is already happening.</div>
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If these proposed definitions are so broad as to include everything, and now everything is thus a game, then let's play everything! </div>
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There's been talk about games and what they mean and ought to mean.</div>
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It's not possible to make a meaningful game. Likewise, it's not possible to make a meaningful song or picture or story. Meaning arises from our interactions with these forms, from how we play them. (It <i>is</i> possible to make a <i>good</i> game-- focus group testing is helpful here. Goodness is not great, though-- it's useful; it works<i> </i>rather than plays; this seems to describe the bulk of most design processes).</div>
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Games with a didactic quality like Jon Blow's <i>Braid</i> can fool us into thinking that meaning is a thing that is being created and then handed down to us-- the intensity of the implied value systems that come packaged in game designs are often mistaken for the meaning itself. Sometimes our perceived meanings line-up very neatly with what we're told are a game's intended meanings, and this can feel good, but such an effect is incidental rather than essential in any way.</div>
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It's not possible to make a meaningful game, but all <i>played</i> games are meaningful. Meaning can be generated but not located. It's a process rather than an object. </div>
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Certain boundaries in a playspace will encourage certain types of play, and from these, if they're played intuitively and honestly, we experience the intensity of this thing called meaning<i>.</i> We then sometimes attribute this meaning to the creators of the game, and this is wrong. We can thank the creators, but we need to respect our own subjectivity (though to then thank ourselves would be foolish-- can we learn to thank the play impulse that somehow exists both inside <i>and</i> <i>outside</i> of ourselves?)</div>
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The <a href="http://wombflashforest.blogspot.com/2011/06/elements-of-music-as-elements-of-games.html">relationship between music and videogames</a> is not a rhetorical one, it's not just an analogy-- the language describing it may be, but the various identities are a fact. Structurally, there's little the two forms don't have in common. This has design implications-- rhythmically, formally, texturally, etc. Most importantly, in practice, both music and games are <i>played</i>-- and can be played in very similar ways.</div>
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Musical instruments are games, as are compositions. They are possibility spaces with boundaries implicitly or explicitly inviting certain types of play.</div>
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Videogames are not competitions by necessity, they are play-spaces. Play is the subject and the source of meaning. How do we play? The kinds of meanings that exist in music are the same kinds of meanings that exist, fundamentally, (but lying latent), in games-- they don't point at anything but the experience itself, at the materials and interrelationships that form the binding structures of that process.</div>
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This kind of meaning, and how it doesn't point at anything (it just <i>is</i>), is the reason why some people call music abstract. But music isn't abstract. Meanings that point (signs --> signifieds (words, narrative, realism)) are abstractions, divisions/boxings, of reality-- they necessarily leave a remainder. Musical meaning doesn't box anything and thus encompasses everything. Musical meaning is <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_art">concrete</a></i>. (The social/contextual meanings in music, what <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Essays_on_Music.html?id=vUUhH7rVyH4C">Adorno calls the "historical"</a>, point away from this toward a more linguistic system of signs. But this system, too, is fluid. <a href="http://wombflashforest.blogspot.com/2011/11/recorded-music-as-object-and-process.html">Remember</a>: we've all only ever experienced, and are continuing to experience, <i>one piece of music</i> (our own)).</div>
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There's a relationship between musical meaning and mathematical meaning-- at it's most basic, harmony (pitched and non-pitched) and its foundation in simple arithmetic. These identities become more vivid (in our minds, at least, if not our ears) when we study scores and consider those sets of instructions as the music itself-- this is how schools like to teach music, as a kind of math game. Computer programs are complex sets of instructions (scores), and it will be helpful to apply kinds of thinking gleaned from score analysis to game creation-- systemic approaches to harmony, rhythm, texture, etc. are useful tools. But the score is an abstraction, and when we try to live in it, almost all of music's essence is lost. From John Cage: "Mathematics enables us, it seems to me, to think about, say, water-- without jumping into it" (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCswEbPcBfg">video</a>). The experience of music, and its essential meaning, comes from our jumping into the water.</div>
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To explore these meanings-- forget narrative and forget "game design." We'll study music-- rhythm, harmony, contour, texture (and allow ourselves to freely identify these qualities-- to apply them to colors, motions, touch). We'll play music, listen to (play) music, and allow ourselves to question what music means in these contexts. We'll see music, and touch it, too, and <i>live</i> it when possible. Music is not a form-- it's an <i>ethic</i> of sorts, a way of being. It is a fluid answer to the question "how do we generate meaning in the play process?" How do we play? Competitive games have required the player's submission to an imposed set of values governing their ideal actions-- when we are no longer governed by such rules, how will we choose how to act? Again, John Cage (via some others): <a href="http://entropyandme.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_archive.html">music's ideal function</a> is "to quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influence."</div>
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Meaning-making in instrumental play (goal-oriented-- a value system forced on us by competitive games) is inherently and necessarily at odds with meaning-making in musical play. Though-- the two categories are not opposites. Instrumental play is goal-oriented; maybe the opposite of this is free play, which is something like an unreachable utopian state (or a <a href="http://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html">Temporary Autonomous Zone</a>?). Musical play describes a way of being that seeks love and identity with the world and its boundaries (to push up against these boundaries, to know them, and try to to break past them)-- its precondition is sensitivity, but nothing escapes its sense of possibility. (The most vicious sentiments might emerge from playing musically. Anything. Such attitudes might grow more intense or might be followed by a release of tension and subsequent transition into a state affirmation and tenderness-- the possible forms are endless). </div>
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Notated compositions (and <i>plans</i> for future music-making in general) are a series of instructions, boundaries that we then play in. They <i>are not music</i> in the truest sense. Musicality playfully emerges from these boundaries, in affirmation of and tension with them. And it's this emergent spirit that is the essence of musical play. This spirit has no bounds. The Fluxus scripts, happenings, and other participatory arts of the 60s took a radical kind of musicality and played with it in new boundaries-- physical space, conceptual space, etc. (these, as opposed to the kind of aural space that music creates). Musicality requires a kind of openness, a total presence in the world, being here now. This openness is the foundation of all musical play.</div>
<div class="p3">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<b><i>4</i></b></div>
<div class="p1">
<b><i><br /></i></b></div>
<div class="p1">
The boundaries of competitive structures exist in direct conflict with our impulse to play musically, and yet, through this tension, such forms can point toward unique musical value systems. They will be fierce. The "guerilla tactics" in Zorn's <i><a href="http://www.4-33.com/scores/cobra/cobra-notes.html">Cobra</a></i> are a good example, an aggressive transfer of power and a rare example of competition emerging from musicality, instrumental play contextualized as an exception rather than a given.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Rich competitive structures are considered holy by many game designers and players. And, it's true, competitions can reveal amazing seemingly endless vistas to our senses of possibility. This openness points toward the divine. Then-- the feeling shuts off when we realize that the possibilities can be ranked by order of their usefulness. We will be more likely to succeed if we behave in certain ways. The problem here is that the conditions of success, and sometimes the methods for achieving success, are pre-determined by the game's design. The game imposes a value system on our experience. The divine impulse can remain intact only if we're always open to our inner sense of infinite possibility (which will mean entertaining the less "useful" possibilities). I've read about Go masters that maybe play like this, and Bobby Fischer searcher Joshua Waitzkin describes similar states of mind in his book "The Art of Learning"-- it seems that along with mastery of a rational craft comes the confidence and ability to let rational things go, and to live intuitively. In life, we can choose our craft, and this choice can constantly be renewed; in competitive games, not as freely (except insofar as our experience of choosing and living in the game is an extension of our played experience of life).</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Competitive play channels creative force but to an end other than itself. If our love of a process (a craft, a game), compels us to move in a direction other than that in which the game points, we encounter a barrier, and since we have freely chosen to play, we will now choose to stop, and will have chosen suicide in the play space. Of course, we're not forced to choose this way, but to choose otherwise requires a respect for and love of the game (a respect for its imposed values and a love of the experiential aspects of the playspace). </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
A utopian state of play: all possibilities are ranked as highly as possible; each, when chosen, introduces an entirely new set of possibilities, each of which is also ranked as highly as possible. In this setting, the word "ranked" loses its meaning; infinities open and give way to new infinities, and so on. The life of the game is the life of the spirit.</div>
<div class="p3">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<b><i>5</i></b></div>
<div class="p1">
<b><i><br /></i></b></div>
<div class="p1">
If we're going to admit systems of ranking into our games, to construct goals, their design should come from an intimacy with the materials of the playspace <i>as a freely-played space</i>, meaning one explored through our own self-directed (and constantly dissolving?) goals; these goals should invite us to play with processes that direct us toward and help realize our vision of inner utopia. This is the end to which goals should be a means: a final played application outside the structures of competition. It's, in part, to a celebration of particular strong values like these that we can owe the creative triumphs of games like <i><a href="http://wombflashforest.blogspot.com/2012/05/thoughts-on-journey-way.html">Way</a></i>, which invites us to create simple languages and then destroy and recreate new ones in a final double-coda, <i>Minecraft</i>, which allows us to explore the conceptual wall between nature and culture, <i>Mario Galaxy</i>, which teaches us how to dance with all the world<i> </i>as our partner.. etc.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
There is nothing inherently wrong with explicit goals and the instrumental play they call for. What <i>is</i> wrong is the widely-held assumption that these kinds of barriers and motivators are essential to the form of games. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The essential meanings in games (in play), function at a lower level. If we start from an understanding of games as musical objects/spaces, instruments for self-exploration, our intrinsic attraction to explicit goals (as boundaries that describe ways of playing) diminishes, and we see that we can (<i>must</i>, even) start from nothing, from chaos. From here, we search and listen, and if our love of a system compels us to teach others particular ways of playing via artificial boundaries (rules, which <i>can</i> be broken-- the more <a href="http://www.hobbygamedev.com/spx/games-are-artificial-videogames-are-not-games-have-rules-videogames-do-not/">fundamental boundaries</a> cannot, they can just be pushed), then we should act accordingly. These goals emerge from love.</div>
<div class="p3">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<b><i>6</i></b></div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The question of how games and play generate meaning and how they can be made more meaningful ultimately points in the direction that all such questions must point: toward truth, the divine, the world/universe, god, tao, the eternal, infinite, spiritual, whatever, etc.-- absolutes (that, yet, may be anything but absolute-- impossible to place, constantly changing). The simple "how" question ultimately wants to ask, before it has become too useful and too realistic: "how can games and play be <i>the most</i> meaningful that they can be?" This is a question of values, and it can be answered only in action, only when it's truly <i>played</i>-- when it's a natural continuation of the divine impulse, that perpetual motion, unfiltered creativity. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
How we choose to play and find meaning in what we play-- these are fundamental questions. We're on a search for particular (fluid) ways of playing-- tactics that might further our search, that might point us in the right direction (all directions?).<br />
<br />
And <i>what</i> we play? (we are what?)</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Competitive structures have had, and will continue to have, many things to teach us (at best-- about valued/loved play processes), but they lack a particular kind of <i>realism</i> that's wanting in our games right now-- playspaces that, as in life (though very differently), allow for the full flourishing of our creative faculties, the active exploration of shifting possibility spaces and the intimacy with the materials that form their boundaries. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Musicality as play-within-constraints can reveal for us ways of playing more fluidly, of opening ourselves to the world and to that infinite sense of possibility at every moment. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Now, as players, we'll need to learn to bear the burden of generating our own meanings. And as designers, we'll need to bear the burden of imposing implied values (if not meanings) on the player with our boundaries. We'll open these forms and gladly hand over certain variables to the player because we know that it's not particular values that establish meanings, but the dynamics of change that generate them.<br />
<br />
//<br />
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</div>David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-74925077066681236952012-05-05T13:08:00.001-07:002012-05-05T13:08:31.374-07:00Thoughts on Journey & Way<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br /></div>
<b>1</b><br />
<br />
I didn't get to play <i>Journey</i>'s mutli-player aspect, and I'm not sure how much I'm missing because of that.. lots, I'm sure. I did play thatgamecompany team member Chris Bell's <i>Way,</i> though (<a href="http://www.makeourway.com/">play it!</a>), which seems something like a relevant substitution<i>.</i> For me, much of it's meaning emerged from the two rapid shifts of possibility space at the end: the initial hop-around meetup and the map/chalkboard denouement. One after another. The first change-- the effect of being in an entirely new situation with someone (or something) we've only ever known in a particular setting but have gotten to know very well there; the languages of precision we've developed up to that point give way to a more fluid language of dance/gesture (a language developed further in <i>Journey</i>). Then, a repetition of the effect (of change) initiates a new state of things on a higher level, change itself as the new constant, the situation as a variable, a fundamental kind of rapid un/re-learning, a destabilization pointing toward a continual dissolve and rebirth of possibility. This affects how we play, and the played end is a very beautiful thing, indeed. The puzzles, the learning we're involved in for the bulk of the game, they're fun enough-- but it's what they're preparing us for that gets to the real heart of the matter, a shared sense of shifting possibility, our subjectivities as the only constants in an otherwise variable space. When this is felt, it's profound. From the sequence of events I played through in <i>Journey</i>'s single player game, it seems unlikely that any similarly <i>designed</i> re-contextualization of relating with an other has been suggested (though, of course, so much more than what's suggested will emerge in play-- for now I can only try to imagine the dances).<br />
<br />
<b>2</b><br />
<div class="p1">
<br />
When I started <i>Journey</i>, I looked around and figured it was an exploration game, and I set off in some direction other than that of the mountain which we are implicitly asked to head towards. When I found myself stuck, trying to force my way up too-steep a sand dune, I felt let down. From here on out, I redirected my energies and intentions toward achieving the goals the game had laid out for me-- my playing became instrumentalized. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The game is a series of playgrounds stitched together, each with one entrance and one exit. Some playgrounds are more liberating than others. All of <i>Journey</i>'s are embedded with values asking that we eventually rank our possible ways of playing by order of how well a given action will help us find the exit. We are free to stay in the spaces for as long as possible, and this is occasionally a stunning thing, but at other times they don't seem to be designed for such use-- rather more like giant versions of the aisles of Ikea, which ask us to move in one direction, to see everything along the way (and to hopefully find some beauty in these spectacles), and then to check out.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Like <i>Super Mario Galaxy</i> before it (one example among many, I'm sure), Journey rewards our discipline and obedience with a wealth of movement-treasures. At it's best, it opens some new directions in videogames as digital ballet. Gardens of carpets and scarves that give us the power of flight are lovingly arranged in ways that suggest particular choreographies. Upward motion, climbing the little nodes of possibility, each hop a meaningful thing. Falling, recovering. Dunes as ski slopes, etc. All of this-- rhythmic fluidity. A lot of this meaning is a kind of <i>touched</i> meaning. The variety of the terrain, how the game's responses to input change accordingly with our navigation of the physical environment, how possibility shifts on that level. That's the essence of <i>Journey</i>-- these little details, the procedural manipulation of key variables between input and output (this is what <i>feel</i> is, I think?). Timbre. Like a musical instrument, a system of tight feedback loops, a tool for exploring possible meanings in time. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
And yet, when we get into these intimate systems at a low level like this, and really learn to love them, to let <i>touch</i> teach us something-- when we've finally become comfortable collaborating with the game in the process of generating our played meanings-- it's difficult to not contrast the joys of that kind of emergent experience with the grander, yet more contrived, spatial/narrative ambitions of the game. That we're told this is a<i> </i>journey, a meaningful traversal of space-- we'd expect from this a generation of meaning on a higher level, too, a valuation of where we begin and where we're going to end up. But it doesn't emerge, because of the imposed top-down design. We follow the path, the string of playgrounds. Our <i>sense</i> of possibility is far greater than our <i>space</i> of possibility here. Play that emerges from the bottom up in strength/abundance naturally wants to ascend, to rise up all the way into space, to become a dancing star. The play impulse leads itself , in dialogue with the environment, but not with the environment as a static thing; rather as a musical thing, a living thing. A <i>world</i> more than an <i>environment</i>. Spaces designed from the top down impose a limit, an atmosphere. This is inevitable. Not to say that there's no place for limits imposed by top-down design. Rather, the function of these limits should be a declaration of radical values, a means of breaking the tyranny of habit, to encourage a new kind of play, more true/beautiful than we might have discovered on our own.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br />
Journey is a spatial exploration game and yet our greatest freedoms are still constrained by the closed boundaries of a bead occupying a particular place along a string (maybe a stick is more accurate, less malleable). It's a mechanical exploration game (insofar as <i>touch</i> can be explored), and yet we're not given the openness that's a necessary foundation for the free association of our played impulses. Let's melt the beads, explore their topological equivalents, allow constants to give way to variables. That would be an exploration game. The string can still be used, of course, but let's use one made of rubber. Or, instead--let's tighten the string, and shave these beads down to their most essential qualities, <i>Mario Galaxy's </i>strategy. No time wasted, constant imposition of atmosphere from the top-down. We'll let things melt, but they'll always bring us someplace new, and quickly, too. This will be more work, but it'll also be more play.<br />
<br />
For now, though, this is what we have, and we'll play here if we're compelled to do that. I'm torn. I want to play with the raw materials of the space and situation in whatever way seems most suited to continuing my ritual of focused presence in the moment, my <i>flow</i>, and this necessarily leads me in unpredictable directions-- how could it not? But then, I also recognize the power of the rewards I'm given when I follow the rules..<br />
<br />
<b>3</b><br />
<br />
Possible directions for future research: observing the variables in a space like this which erect the boundaries of possibility, how they change over time, how they're determined by geography and player actions, etc. Even on the lowest levels, games are (unknowingly?) creating beautiful pieces of tangible music (whether audible or not, usually the latter). To dig into these changes (the source of musicality), to explore ways that change itself functions as an expressive device. Maybe we can learn some important things from <i>Journey</i> at this level. And beyond this, to trace the trajectories of subjective desire at a low level, and to create spaces that allow these impulses to flourish; spaces designed for the motivic development of actions, spatially/temporally augmented, the smallest seeds growing into the tallest trees. And to really understand that smallest seed, to touch its vibrational qualities, we need to design musical interactions at a low level-- these are not the modules of a composed block form, but rather the variable pressure and angle of a finger depressing a string, or mouth blowing a reed, etc. Once we can hear the seed, we'll really feel it better, it's output will touch our ears, and to start with this, we'll be hardpressed to go on designing against its own touched inclinations.</div>David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-89007793171333888802012-05-04T13:33:00.000-07:002012-05-04T13:33:18.225-07:00Dissolving Musical Space<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5LXVND9N8x0" width="420"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
(drawing in <a href="http://al.chemy.org/">Alchemy</a>)<br />
<br />
In playing music that hasn't been designed, and in forms of music that have been designed to be played-- we, the subject, & our materials, our objects, begin the process of dissolving into one another.<br />
<div class="p1">
<br />
Free improvisation, music that hasn't been designed, is an example of this dissolve. The self into the instrument, into the group, the situation. Improvisations can surf the dissolve, prolong the dynamic state.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br />
But <i>forms</i> of music? can <i>dissolving</i> <i>spaces</i> be designed?</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
First, can <i>musical spaces</i> be designed?</div>
<div class="p1">
Folk forms, musics that <i>we</i> play, create spaces like these. Music designed to be played.<br />
We start from the uncountable multitude of aural traditions. Convention. The gradual systemization of loose form.<br />
Infinite possibility giving way to shaped possibility.</div>
<div class="p1">
Notation can help serve this function-- it communicates possibility spaces to audiences with a read/write literacy of its system. Scores in general-- visual, verbal, etc.<br />
These are, at their best, guidelines rather than directives.<br />
<br />
But scores aren't for everybody-- they're for <i>musicians</i>, for <i>artists</i>, and they thus ignore that important observation, that "an artist isn't a special kind of person; rather, every person is a special kind of artist."<br />
Professionalism breeds work at the expense of play.<br />
Start from what we have.<br />
Now-- recordings rule over our musical landscape.<br />
They have become the new "scores," directives, which all too many live performances seek to reproduce, and lives seek to live in harmony with-- mechanically, reproducible.</div>
<div class="p1">
There is an intimacy with music that has been lost in our shift toward listening to recordings,</div>
<div class="p1">
A diminished sense of possibility. Read only.<br />
An object rather than a process.<br />
Toward the impossibility of systemic intervention, <a href="http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/report.htm">pure spectacle.</a></div>
<div class="p1">
But not quite-- we know, at the same time, that these recordings open up new possibilities.</div>
<div class="p1">
We know we can use them.</div>
<div class="p1">
We know that in some situations we can start & stop them, and we then begin to rediscover that current of musical play. Can we also stretch? isolate? invert? transpose? To the whole? To components? The threads making up the fabric?</div>
<div class="p1">
Melting constants: variables.</div>
<div class="p1">
A recording <i>is</i> a thread. A component-- but of something new.</div>
<div class="p1">
The <i>material</i> of the recording is a substance to sculpt with.</div>
<div class="p1">
Sampling? Yes, but only as a process-- <i>not</i> the object that it produces.</div>
<div class="p1">
Synthesis, similarly. The materials of computer music, searching for a <i>new</i> open future where<i> </i>all participants are players.<br />
Imaginary landscapes-- now melting to our touch.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Music as a Tangible Process rather than <a href="http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/draft/ben/feld/mod1/readings/reich.html">Gradual Process</a>.</div>
<div class="p1">
An instrument, a composition, a playspace.</div>
<div class="p1">
Product as raw material-- the dissolving of recordings, of all <i>things</i>.</div>
<div class="p1">
A new kind of open form, to discover a fluid architecture of musical space.</div>
<div class="p1">
And to play out existing architectures, to dance to them.</div>
<div class="p1">
From these dances-- a shifting form, born of the dissolving self.</div>David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-76935778537163210382012-05-03T13:34:00.000-07:002012-05-03T13:34:05.214-07:00Silent Play<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/WRgaIHl-kXc" width="420"></iframe>
<br />
<div class="p1">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>4'33"</i>, John Cage's famous "silent piece", is a kind of aestheticized proof of the non-existence of silence. The performer is asked to play through three movements, each with one instruction: "tacet" (meaning "remain silent"). At this point, the sounds in the environment become the focus of our attention-- these sounds will always be present, there is no silence. More than an ordinary piece of music, it resembles a ritual, a spiritual exercise in self-restraint and openness to the external world. Cage always talked about the piece as something he played regularly, in all kinds of different situations-- in the city, on the beach, wherever. Perhaps more than a "piece," it's a <i>whole</i>-- a way of being. </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I've had some of my own powerful experiences with it. I remember sitting in my backyard a few summers ago, listening to all the traffic go by. I'd recently been reading a lot of Cage's writings, and I was listening to all of this as I would listen to music. I was just becoming interested in response structures, cybernetic relationships of a kind in all sorts of music-- call and response, chain reactions, loose pulse, etc. This kind of systemic thinking had a profound effect on me, and my experience of the traffic system's dense counterpoint heightened my sense of presence in the environment-- in a way, an awareness of myself as a subject in an endless participatory system, an identity with external forces that behaved the way they did precisely because of my own action (or inaction). If I'd felt the nihilistic urge, I could have gone into the middle of the street to cause an accident (/death) and all the rhythmic and textural changes in the music that would come with that. Cars crashing, bodies squishing, sirens arriving, etc. Xenakis' Formalized Music describes a similar situation..</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
So, in the right state of mind, the silent piece, which is really a kind of play tactic, can help us uncover new dimensions of this fundamental ludic (playful) message: non-action as action. Contemplation as play. It's a way of being that's rarely encouraged (or even allowed, thanks to time limits and other deadly forces) in videogames, games in general, and maybe this is unfortunate. Still, to be silent (still)-- it's a freedom we can never really be denied. It's an often ignored outer bound of our inner/psychological possibility space deserving of serious exploration. If a reason we play is to seek a kind of identity between ourselves and the materials we're engaged with (and this is a necessary precondition of any spiritual play process), silent play is a way of letting the space be itself on its own terms before engaging with it. Confucius said something along these lines.. "if I am going to play music with another person, first I will sit in silence, and listen to them playing by themselves. Then I will join in."<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="p1">
***</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Now, to respond to the above video, a performance of <i>4'33"</i> in Level 1-2 of <i>Super Mario Bros.</i> (SNES <i>All-Star</i> version) -- Imagine the game is now more aware of our silence. How long it's been since we last pushed a button, and what that button was. If the button was "A", the room gradually begins to grow when we release it. If it was B, the hue of everything on the screen shifts, cycles. The speeds of these processes are determined by how long the button was held. The goombas, too-- if the last button was A, they'll jump in a rhythm based on the time relation between that pressing and the previous pressing. If the button was B, they'll turn into fish, and suffocate-- the speed of their death is determined by the size of the room. The lights grow brighter as they die. If the last button we pressed was the down arrow, water will begin to rise (and again, its speed is variable). The color of the room determines the speed at which which we move through the water, it's resistance, or "feel". And in the water, when the feel is right, we too might become a fish.</div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-82578944961640757092011-11-07T14:14:00.000-08:002011-11-07T14:14:13.153-08:00Recorded Music as Object (and Process)<div class="p1">1. When I play music with another person, at my best I have only one goal-- to <i>play</i> <i>with</i> them. It's the same with an instrument, which has its own unique properties that suggest rhythms, melodies, forms, etc. It's the same with all objects in all situations-- everything essentially functions as a collaborator. Anything can always surprise us if we allow it to-- love the collaborator and whatever surprises it might bring.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">2. Recordings are used as functional objects in the lives of listeners; in practice, this diminishes their intrinsic meanings and elevates the meanings of whatever it is that they're being used for. To play a recording is to <i>play music</i>. There are no good recordings or bad recordings, only good or bad playings-- everything is useful in some context. (Everything is useful in every context; with all objects and in all situations, anything can be listened to, reacted to, <i>played with</i>).</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">3. Brian Eno explained an idea of his somewhere-- over the course of our whole lives, we as individuals only ever listen to <i>one</i> piece of music, a composite of everything we've ever heard. A long time ago, the sections of an individual's "one piece" would likely have been made up of mostly "complete" pieces of music-- an entire concert, an entire recording, etc. Now, most sections of our individual pieces are made up of musical "fragements"-- surfing the internet to find something to our liking, walking in and out of environments with music playing in the background, excerpts of music used to accompany other media, samples, etc. (In practice, fragments and repetitions).</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">4. Recordings are used as functional objects in the lives of listeners; how we play with a recording is more important than the recording itself.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">5. Music software is lowering the barrier of entry to making music. Already, applications exist that give "non-musicians" expressive control of musical materials without their needing to practice a technical craft. One particular craft is still necessary, though, as it always has been-- one of <i>focused</i> <i>listening</i>. </div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">6. Sampling is a process of playing with recordings as materials: one-way, asynchronous improvisation. At one point I felt that the most important use of this process would be an answer to the question "how can these I use these samples?"; now, I prefer to ask "how can these samples use me?"</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">7. How we play is more important than what we play and it doesn't matter how we play as long as it's <i>play</i>.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">8. A long time ago, the sections of an individual's "one piece" would likely have been made up of mostly "complete" pieces of music-- blocks-- and most perceived meanings would have emerged from the completeness of the blocks themselves. Composers would have had a different experience, tending to listen to blocks on lower levels, the "complete" pieces as composites of smaller blocks, musical materials (instruments, compositional devices, etc.). Now that "complete" pieces have themselves become blocks, "nonmusicans" can become composers with focused listening and loving responses to the blocks at hand. The composites (pieces) which musical materials of the past have produced for us have become our own musical materials.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">9. Now we can organize recorded materials, whatever they are, in such a way that both respects possible uses implied by their forms (to love our materials and the ways they surprise us), and respects our own inclinations, our own musical responses to the unique places we occupy in our "one piece".</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">10. (<a href="http://davidkanaga.bandcamp.com/album/amor-fati">amor fati</a>, "love of fate")</div>David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-16383967643281440542011-07-18T13:22:00.000-07:002011-07-18T13:22:09.529-07:00Soundtracks 1<div class="p1">Video/computer games (most? all?) <a href="http://wombflashforest.blogspot.com/2011/06/elements-of-music-as-elements-of-games.html">function similarly</a> enough in time to the way that music does (particularly improvised music) that they can themselves be considered music, or, at the very least, musically meaningful play structures. I've thought about this idea enough now that I'd consider it a truism, and that it isn't apparent to <i>everyone</i> seems due, in large part, to the fact that game soundtracks have so far done very little to reveal the extent of this musicality. </div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">To be clear here, I think there's a simple formula that can be followed, that has <i>not</i> yet been pursued with any seriousness (or playfulness), that will help begin to reveal the music that lies latent in games:</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"><b>For every change of state in a game, there should be a corresponding change of state in its soundtrack</b>.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">As presented, this is hardly a novel idea except for the inclusion of one word: "every" (which can be substituted with "as many as possible" when dealing with technical limitations).</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">Recent games such as Mario Galaxy and Portal 2 (<a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MusicalGameplay">and more)</a> have done some exceptional micro-studies in musical interactivity, with certain segments/levels mapping game events and processes to the soundtrack exactly the way that I'd like. However, they can't have mapped more than, say, 5% of game events to musical events, and as such, the musical interactivity becomes a novelty, rather than, as it ought to be, the articulation of a new expressive language.</div><div class="p2"><br />
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</div><div class="p1">It's as if, during a game of basketball, there was a 5 minute "experimental" interlude that accompanied all players' actions with a dynamic/improvised soundtrack by the pep band-- this would, without a doubt, be my favorite bit of the game, but it would also be a disappointment in that it didn't take that idea as far as it would stretch, to establish a new kind of basketball, an entirely new formal language, an improvised ballet of a sort. </div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">Or, if this example is, itself, too novel, it's also as if early humans making vocal sounds, developing a spoken language of signs, for a moment produced sustained tones in unison, singing a perfect fifth--the beginnings of harmony--and then laughed it off, surprised at the unexpected beauty of it all, yet unwilling to continue to explore for longer than 10 seconds, unwilling to discover the language of <i>music</i> itself. </div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">As pioneers of this new language-- musical gameplay-- games such as Mario Galaxy and Portal 2 ought to be celebrated; as <i>ideals</i>, however, they ought to be tossed aside as garbage, having done only a small fraction of the work (and <i>play</i>) that's necessary. </div>David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-76347243308677398272011-06-13T17:40:00.000-07:002011-06-14T12:32:49.969-07:00Elements of Music as Elements of Games1. Rhythm<br />
<div class="p1">2. Form</div><div class="p1">3. Timbre</div><div class="p1">4. Harmony</div><div class="p1">5. Melody</div><div class="p1">6. Dynamics</div><div class="p1">7. Texture</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">The goal here is to identify elements of games that function similarly, or identically, to each of these musical elements. I'm hesitant to counter the conventional wisdom that games need their own critical vocabulary in such an outright way as pushing the music-game relationship this far (melody in gameplay?), but it's not without purpose. My hope is that by studying and exploring the relationship between the two forms, game makers might be able to better learn from pieces of music the ways in which abstract meanings (which "point" at nothing, but are often the most profound) can be created and used in their designs. At the same time, I hope that players might tune into musical aspects of play that they otherwise wouldn't have. </div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">1. Rhythm</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">This is the most obvious parallel, rhythm being basically identical (I think? tell me if I'm wrong) in both games and music. Wikipedia defines rhythm as "the arrangement of sounds and silences in time", which I'll abstract further as "the arrangement of events in short stretches of time" (the arrangement of "long" stretches defining form). Mario's jumps, the spectacular 18th level of Portal (see video, starting at 8:30), Braid's time reversal, and on and on: sequences of game events regularly present us with unique, highly memorable rhythms. Player input contributes to game rhythm as does non-player object behavior and placement (the arrangement of matter in space is a powerful way of suggesting a rhythm; the relationship between architecture and music-- can we <i>not </i>dance about architecture?).<br />
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</div><div class="p1">For more info: I write about game rhythm in my <a href="http://www.davidkanaga.com/miscmusic/time_structures_thesis.pdf">old thesis</a>, Kirk Hamilton writes about it in <a href="http://kotaku.com/5808033/the-unsung-musical-secret-of-great-gamesand-how-some-games-get-it-so-wrong">his recent column</a>, and I'm sure others have as well. Let me know if you're aware of any other good sources on this.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">2. Form</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">The arrangement of events in long stretches of time. Obviously, there's some crossover between this and rhythm, with slow rhythms (chess) and quick forms (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarioWare,_Inc.:_Mega_Microgame$!">Warioware</a>) moving at a similar pace, and becoming, maybe, indistinguishable (not that those two games are at all indistinguishable-- just that their pacing might be hard to categorize as either distinctly rhythmic or formal). Aside from its time sub-dividing, what seems unique to me about form, and musical form in particular, is the way it relates events (motifs) from different points in a composition to one another, creating new meanings out of the simple processes of repetition and variation. Musical form has a lot to do with narrative form, and has been used quite extensively in this guise. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Ocarina_of_Time">Ocarina of Time</a> is a great example of a two-part form, with part 2 functioning as an extended variation of part 1. The Mario games do repetition and variation wonderfully, with old mechanics constantly being re-contextualized by a level's design.<br />
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There's so much to study here, and I hope to return to it in greater depth... maybe with a critique of Jonathan Blow's <a href="http://number-none.com/blow/prototypes/index.html">Raspberry</a>, which I recently replayed--it's a game that does an admirable job of consciously creating its own rhythmic and formal language and developing it musically.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">3. Timbre</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">This is the first element that seems to be pushing the relationship a bit-- in fact, quite a lot. Timbre, also known as "tone color," is defined by Wikipedia as "the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices or musical instruments." (Despite both being stringed instruments, a guitar and piano sound different-- they have different timbres). Unlike rhythm and form, which exist in games in much the same way that they do in music, timbre, as defined above, is incapable of existing in games, being a physical property of <i>sound</i>. Still, if we go backwards a bit, and pick apart our definition/understanding, we may find a fitting analogy/parallel.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">I don't know anything about physics, but, using my fingers and common sense, it seems clear that timbre is a function of <i>touch</i> in sound-- certain tactile qualities manifesting themselves sonically. Pianos and guitars sound different because they use different types of string, one is hammered with felt while the other is plucked or strummed, one is much larger than the other, etc. So, while the sonic aspects of timbre may be untransferable to an understanding of games, the tactile element is certainly <i>very</i> relevant. Walking on different surfaces in Mario games (excuse my repeated use of these as examples), like ice, sand, and honey, there is a distinctive tactile experience that, if not a kind of timbre itself, is certainly very much like the played experience of producing different timbres. Bringing back the old analogy from my thesis, the mechanics of a game can be likened to an instrument in a piece of music; the <i>feel</i> of those mechanics (or how they interact with the world, i.e. honey), being the feel of instrument, is an experience which has everything to do with timbre. </div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">Watch this Derek Bailey clip, and go to a guitar to make all those sounds. It's fun--it <i>feels</i> great-- like walking through sand, ice, and honey.<br />
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</div><div class="p1">4. Harmony</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">Harmony as defined by pitch relationships has no place in a gameplay analysis. However, there is, again, a broader definition which could theoretically be applied with success. Pitch harmony describes how fast one pitch is vibrating compared to another. A pitch an octave above another is vibrating twice as fast. A pitch a perfect fifth (the first interval of "twinkle twinkle little star") above another is vibrating 1.5 times as fast. &c&c... So, pitched harmony can be described by simple (sometimes, though sometimes not: read up <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation">here</a>) ratios.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">The idea with applying this to games is that the speed of these "pitches" can be slowed down dramatically, with the "vibrating" units of time producing rhythms (or forms) instead of pitches. To do this, repetitions (of events) need to happen less than ~10 times per second as opposed to, say, 440 (this is how many times per second an A below middle C vibrates).</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">Though it's not interactive, there's interesting precedent in the visual harmony pieces of James Whitney. See the video below, and the <a href="http://wheelof.com/whitney/">whitney music box</a> (this reveals the harmonic principles really nicely). He's got <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Harmony-Complementarity-Music-Visual/dp/007070015X">a good book on the subject</a>, too, though it looks like it's sort of rare... some libraries ought to have it. <br />
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</div><div class="p1">To my knowledge, no games have used this device consciously. However, it wouldn't be difficult to implement as a visual/spatial device, or one based on event timings.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">5. Melody</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">I've got nothing to say here except that melodies in the traditional sense perform a kind of free movement within a harmonic space. So, shifting spatial/rhythmic harmonies could potentially produce a similar effect? This really is pushing this analogy further than it wants to go, I think... so, let's stop there.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">6. Dynamics</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">How loud or quiet a sound is. Again, not applicable unless we consider the processes used by an instrumentalist to create a loud or quiet sound. This is generally controlled by the intensity of input. The speed of swinging a Wiimote, or how much finger is pressed down on a touch screen (this has been used to simulate velocity), or how quickly an analog stick is moved from point 0 to point 1 could be considered fitting comparisons. </div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">7. Texture<br />
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Wikipedia calls it "the way melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic materials are combined in a composition, thus determining the overall quality or sound of a piece." I'd add to that list timbre and dynamics.... so, everything except form; texture describes what's happening in a given section of a form--what sounds are <i>present</i>? what are they <i>doing</i>? It often changes throughout a piece:<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">It's hugely relevant for games, I think, in that it synthesizes all of these musical ideas into a whole: what <i>objects</i> are present? what are they doing? how do their actions (including the players') relate to one another?</div><br />
Game textures parallel musical textures in fairly intuitive ways. I forgot if I'd read him describe it in this way, but Steph Thirion's <a href="http://www.toucheliss.com/">Eliss</a> is a great example of counterpoint in games, insofar as it has the player controlling multiple objects, performing a variety of actions simultaneously. Pikmin sort of feels like you're directing a Big Band. Fighting games are often thought of by skilled players as resembling musical duets or conversations...<br />
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The analogies could go on and on, but the basic idea is out there: a game's texture consists of what objects are present and what they're doing. This is about as simple as it can be, but there's so much that music has and continues to do with this idea, that it would be a shame not to listen.<br />
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I've not been able to go into much depth with any of these elements, though I hope I've made an alright case for considering them legitimate aspects of games (except melody). Of course, lots of games have most of these elements, and many have all of them-- it's because of this that I consider them pieces of music... though I don't consider many to be <i>great</i> pieces of music. I'm not sure what needs to happen to change this (though I have a sense it has to do with a shifting possibility space... more on that later), but I think that studying how music does what it does and how that relates to game designs should prove helpful.<br />
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And on top of this, how the actual sounds being produced by a game contribute to the musicality of the experience is <i>huge</i>... so, more on that in a bit.</div>David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3913506171828262555.post-23301848787705253582011-06-12T16:24:00.000-07:002011-06-13T11:53:45.259-07:00Musical Play<div class="p1">In the fall of 2009, I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis on certain aspects of the relationship between games and music; the paper can be found <a href="http://www.davidkanaga.com/miscmusic/time_structures_thesis.pdf">here</a>, though since writing it, I've not been very happy with it, for a variety of reasons. It's poorly written. The form reflects a messy marriage of my own goals and the project's official requirements. It's fairly boring. Here's a brief summary, which may not always be clear. </div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">1. Games are not just similar to, but, in fact, <i>are</i> music: non-aural music, in the same way that film, dance, and other time-based media are. I think I made this claim having just learned about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_music">visual music</a> and wanted to run with that idea... One of the implications of this is that, once something <i>is</i> music, it's irresponsible in a way to ignore that. People that don't understand the musicality of film are going be lousy film-editors, non-musical dancers are going to disappoint... same thing with games, is what I was trying to point out.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">2. As pieces of music, games function as both instrument and composition. A game's mechanics are its instrumental aspect, in that they set absolute boundaries, "walls" in the possibility space which cannot be ignored. A game's rules are its compositional aspect, artificial boundaries which can be ignored, but which, hopefully, ask the player to explore interesting/meaningful ways of playing that s/he might not have otherwise. This is one of my favorite parts of the paper, though I fail to address a lot of things that I wish I had spent time with... For instance, the fact that I've developed a kind of ethic which favors instrument over composition, the absolute over the artificial-- and, eventually, freedom over form. Or the fact that, despite what I said about my freedom ethic, these concepts don't actually break down into so clean a binary as I might like-- that the grey areas are where some of the most interesting stuff lies.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">3. A value judgment: I consider musical play to be more meaningful than game play. This is because musical play has only aesthetic goals, focused in the present, while game play has competitive goals, focused in the future. I've never really liked "games" proper all that much, so this is an undeniably biased point of view... still, consider those ideas about time, and ask yourself what you value. These types of play are psychological states in the player as opposed to design decisions, though the two ought to be related, I think.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">4. Finally, I conclude with a lazy taxonomy of common game rhythms which basically breaks down to a distinction between the metered and the free. My original outline had a lot more going for it here, and I hope to come back to the idea and do it better justice.<br />
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My goal with this blog is to continue to explore these and other related ideas.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div>David Kanagahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14720627105863755432noreply@blogger.com5