Favorite Game SOUNDTRACKS, Part 2

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 HERE --

I mentioned some other games in addition to these, but since I think Dazed wasn't wanting to confuse its audience too much with border-case inclusions like Cobra or Infinite Sketchpad + Samplr, I'd like to add some notes here on those EXCEPTIONS which are important to me--

These are games or software/play-spaces more generally that have been some of the most 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.

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…

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 player's perspective, rather than a listener's, with the necessary recognition of touch in the music.

0. Playing Music & Not recording

I've often had the thought that all of the very best pieces of music can never have been recorded, because they are literally impossible to record in their touched aspect. A musical happening really only ever happens once, 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 record their output as little as possible. Psychically, once the objects we're playing with begin to solidify structurally as recordings, 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 touch 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.

A. Group Improvisation

Group improvisation is the most fluid-- and in this liquid-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 music games-- it is endlessly generative and compelling as long as we come to it with the energy to dive in and listen and move.. 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 real movements with real psychic effects, etc. The improvisations catalogued at the ilinxgroup bandcamp 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 change 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 ground which is motion itself or constant variation is a useful working hypothesis 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..

1. Cobra

Cobra Score

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 Cobra, 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" players.. 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": highly recommend 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..

2. Flux Game

Very BASIC archetypal game, maybe has also gone by other names. Using a similar structure to Cobra, 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 all materials, 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.

B. Solo Improvisation

I like to think that even "solo music" is not at all solo. There is always the dialogue between player and instrument to account for. I heard somewhere of some group that believes instruments are human beings, and I like this! Whether or not we go this far, the idea of an instrument as personality or organism 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 speed-harmonization technique with this rhythm) is a similarly tangled relation between the player's body and the 'musical information' we are used to accounting for.

1. Ableton's Simpler

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:

With a) a start position 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 keyboard triggering samples c) drifting around octave fourth and fifth key-relations, or planing by smaller intervals for rave block progs.

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 AnySoundWhatever, given its 'skin' by plugging in any existing recording.

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:

2. Keyboard White-Black Organism

"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? 

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 practice 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 as game, 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 consistent ground 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 playing with another player/game/space that thinks these things for us, as a gift. An added bonus is that a proper reproduction 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 shift 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 (all octave Cs, all octave Ebs, etc.), will look very similar to that in a serialist 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 entropy 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 touch and low-integer harmonic-relations, whereas the serialists almost uniformly privileged counting and the principle of universal-relative consonance.. Following this, and you come away with a kind of serial-pentatonic pop-music..

3. Loops / Repetition as Objectification-Spatialization

Making music with computers, the possible relations we can have with repetition are very different 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 very particular kind of bodily-ritual in the process of reproducing the piece-- i.e. tuning into 'infinitesimal approach' phase relation-drifts over long periods (Piano Phase), breathing patterns (Music for 18 Musicians), and generally-- being (bodily) the immanent cause of the repetition 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 amplification is similarly engaged in automation-research). 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 ground 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 cause 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 in the music as long as I just keep playing with it. The more active/willful approach to this can be accomplished by touching 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 loop is turned on, and we're exploring the changing properties of that loop-- as 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. The more passive/receptive approach is to to let the loop go for a long time, and to stand up away from the computer, and to walk around, listening, 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.

4. Overdubs & Smooth Time

We don't really need 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 systems of music, even those that are merely counted but not visualized (all countings are visualized in mental images). There have always nudgings 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 automating/counting behavior 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 know 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, especially when you choose to NOT sync events-- to allow time to be smooth, 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 immediately after. 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 n and production time 2n, 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 2n, which it's not.

4. Through-Composition: Transition Liquidations

Composition-objects, especially when any loops are involved, often leave us with a hard-edged block 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 flows 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 spatialized time 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. 

3. Samplr + Infinite Sketchpad + Pseudo-Mereotopology

Samplr 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 organism-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. 

Alongside, paired w/ Samplr is Infinite Sketchpad, which there is way too little space to talk about here, more soon, 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 through-composed, lacking the scaling self-similarity of traditional fractals, with no repetitions whatsoever automated. This seems like a VERY interesting way to think about scores for me (which are, like games, soundtracked 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 mereological (part/whole relations) paradigm much like that of Infinite Sketchpad. 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 with it, and if you record, this produces another jam, which is different from both the original-object (sample) jam and the played (haptic) jam.

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.

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 in jamB just as much as jamB is in 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, at least some of the components are those that can be found in jamB (jamA's original source, the haptic playspace, 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.

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 dissolved parts, 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 all parts and whole, ceases to do the job.

In Alfred North Whitehead's Process & Reality (which I have not yet read-- Modes of Thought is a GOOD intro, tho, P&R is very systemic, seems rough)-- he describes a metaphysical model which  a mereotopological composition. Mereotopology accounts for, not only parts and wholes, but also interconnectedness-- invariance, edges… LINKS, or 'folds' in spacetime, we might think-- we might have some sense of the felt reality of this from playing Portal or Corrypt, too, or reading some D&G rhizome, surfing 'planes of correspondence,' or Hofstadter's other name for Strange Loops: tangled hierarchies.

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.

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 presently 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...

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 Infinite Music 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 (musick) theory of PLAYSPACES as opposed to works-- 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 fixed 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 playing 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.

C. VIDEOGAMES

The way I think about videogames is like this:

They're able to materialize and automate any structures taken from any games (like those above) as long as they're able to be reduced to and represented with quantity. 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 can MAKE the non-organic player itself-- which can then be played, given meaning, in our own games, with our own rules.

I think of "videogames" as meaning: space of all possible software with input/output structures, 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 does not require sonic realization, 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.

Why call all in/out software VIDEOGAMES in the first place, and not just software, or apps? 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 utility and trying to make things happen, which gets tangled up and too-often lost in the engineering process with its goals and metrics and focus groups, too caught up in the abstract virtuality of its materials, its mutability as number-- ignoring the vibrating material actuality, its mutability as touch (and ignoring, likewise, the pre-abstract virtual continuum that this touch enters into).

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.

Specifically, the idea that we ALLOW THE GAME TO PLAY ~~

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 nonsense, and is not counted by the game, because he's in the air; different activities for different times. Banjo-Kazooie, 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.

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..

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, actually 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.

Notes On Eric Zimmerman's "Manifesto for a Ludic Century"

1.

Eric Zimmerman just put up a new 'manifesto' on Kotaku, excerpted from a book he's releasing soon, The Gameful World. "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. Full text below, cut with my annotations.

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--

/*
there's some good precedent in other play cultures, too. In music, we can find similar theses in Adam Harper's recent Infinite Music, which makes a convincing case for replacing our concept of "music" (which is always an object) with "musicking" (which is always a played process, following Christopher Small); further back, Jacques Attali's Noise presents a similar argument, that we are entering an age which has been pre-shadowed by free jazz improv practices, etc-- an age where everyone is a composer (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 radical intervention-- that is to say-- play, NON-SPECTACLE. To this end, play tactics were developed (see dérive, detournement), as well as architectural speculative-constructions (games; see New Babylon, especially).  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 freeplay (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 play; 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 (On the Aesthetic Education of Man) 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!").
*/

In any case, we can see that there is some interesting precedent for Zimmerman's claims, a current of play-future-Idealism which is not limited to 'games' per se, but rather all playspaces, and which deserves a careful study of its own.

// - - - - - - 

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", as per my prior posting?). Responding to this optimism, a few critical pieces ("The California Ideology," "The Cybernetic Hypothesis"; 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..

// - - - - - -

Rcall the end of the Kotaku piece, where Heather Chaplin responds to Zimmerman with a pressing question/critique of her own: 

"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?"

What she calls the Dark Side of the ludic century--

HYPER-RATIONALITY-- this is really the crux of it, though I'll hold back for now on what exactly its antidote, the play/practice of empathy/material sympathy, might entail...

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 rational 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 very useful dichotomy here, which has nothing to do with explicit gender roles, or actual essences of any sort, but with real, particular ways of being. Like all dichotomies it is ultimately illusory in the split/gap it assumes, but this is one with pragmatic applications which we would do well to attend to. I suggest reading Erin Stephens-North's "Gender and Brilliance" essays (1, 2) 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 lack of femaleness, inconsistency). These problems are dealt with further in Alain Badiou's reading of Cantorian Set Theory (Being and Event), 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 specter in computer culture) of inconsistency, of pure multiplicity, that "the One is not", rather proceeding from that plane of consistency whereby the one has already been counted into "being" as a unit, and all that follows are operations on said units, on the informational-consistent plane. This, I believe, misses the major thrust of Badiou's pure multiplicity 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 inconsistent by nature.  Cantor himself deemed his theory of hierarchical infinities a continuation of the study of irrational numbers, those infinitely precise actualities which, no matter how many times you divide a unit into 2 will always exist between the original unit and its divided parts.

Formally put, I believe it is a search for this pseudo-structural world of inconsistency, irrationality, & infinity that must guide our play practices today, and our structural models that follow-- and only now, play giving rise to design.

//

Zimmerman's work is to be admired-- I learned a lot from Rules of Play (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 play.

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). 

:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/

2. EZ MANIFESTO w/ COMMENTARY

Games are ancient.

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.

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 isn't played? Making, telling, creating-- 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 played them into being?

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.  

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 play, movement (which is simultaneously the immanent actuality of the game in flux, and its goal, one and the same). 

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 ground be? Planting a seed:

SHIFTING POSSIBILITY SPACES

(are ancient)

Digital technology has given games a new relevance.

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.

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 includes active listening). The question is not that of setting games aside as the MOST relevant form as regards quantitative structure, but rather to learn from games about PLAY, and to tune into this play aspect of all quantitative structure. 

This proposition ought to be re-formulated: "digital technology has effectively made all consistent quantity actualizable in the form of material games." Computational-information architectures are remarkable in this sense above all-- that these numerical states have become literally materialized, 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 actuality of irrational number is NOT accounted for, given information architectures' binary atoms which cannot be further split.

The 20^th Century was the century of information.

Systems theory, communications theory, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, computer science – these fields, many of them emerging well before electronic computers, helped create the “information revolution.”

The abstraction of information has made possible massively complex bureaucracies and technologies, from telegraph and telephone networks to NASDAQ and Facebook. 

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, what we choose to pay attention to, and how this limits our sense of possibility. 

It would be a shame, perhaps unwise, to neglect the informatics at play in the arts.

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 value-images to follow in the footsteps of, we should gently apply these concepts to the realm of ideas that have henceforth seemed to be unsusceptible to strict formalization. James Tenney's Meta-Hodos 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 Notebooks), 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?).

In our Ludic Century, information has been put at play. 

Our information networks no longer take the form of vast card catalogs or webs of pneumatic tubes. Digital networks are flexible and organic.

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.

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 player.

To this end, the concept of entropy in information theory should be given special priority in the study of games. Tenney's META Meta-Hodos ends: "there is still nothing known about structural entropies in music,"

Entropy defines those information structures which are irreducible to higher-level patterning, those structures/strings which are uncompressible--  which cannot be accounted for by rule, pattern, but which are necessarily immanent to the patterning itself, the multiple prior to the count. Entropy is that which is the 'remainder' of optimum behavior, game theory.

I believe in this total variability of entropy, pure multiplicity/Chaos, we might find some source of a cosmological meaning of Play. 

PROPOSITION: a player (as a playing thing) should never be defined aside from some concept of entropy, which is the inconsistent (uncompressible) stream of play itself (scaling).

We should study not merely computational information theories, but return to the source-- to thermodynamics, where (a different) entropy 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-- counted as one.

In the 20^th Century, the moving image was the dominant cultural form.

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.

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. 

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-- videogames 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).

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).

Jaron Lanier's prophecy, c. 1996: "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." 

The Ludic Century is an era of games.

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.

Increasingly, the ways that people spend their leisure time and consume art, design, and entertainment will be games - or experiences very much like games.

This is accurate-- but only insofar as games are considered in a broad sense (jazz, cinema, programming, at least). This cannot be stressed enough. What Zimmerman says in the last sentence, "or experiences very much like games", suggests that these experiences themselves will not BE 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 something else, 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 we have made it immune to our own play. This is a horrible mistake! SPECTACLE. 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 softly-- watch out…).

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?

Have we even forgotten, more relevant to our craft, that a piece of software is itself a line of information (though atomic, not continuous)? That all software structure is serial-sequential (linear), just as all software sequence is structural? 

Here is a picture of some Turing tape, to illustrate this point:

We live in a world of systems.

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.

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.

Systems theory will talk about phase spaces, and this has very much to do with the concept of a possibility space, 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 very useful concept in games--

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.

All of this is to say-- the sense of possibility itself is ignored. That which is fully local to the 'system' itself, our own play. 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 sense of possibility.

There are NO CLOSED SYSTEMS. When we play, it is to prove this thesis, to enter into connections 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 we will be the conduit for the openness of the system, the channel/medium for the causal effects the game has on the world

There is a need to be playful.

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.

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. 

Yes! The real question here, though -- 

The message that's sent from "it is not enough to be merely a systems-literate person" is that that systems literacy is one necessity among others. Is it really necessary to be a systems-literate person? 

If this idea of 'consistent' and 'inconsistent' (male/female, structural/intuitive) creativities has some reality, need we really deem the maleness (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 excessive consistency 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? 

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. 

Playing does not need to count quantities, only to touch qualities.

"YOU CAN MAKE VIDEOGAMES" -- but should you? 

We should think like designers.

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.

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. 

More importantly-- we should design like players. 

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 necessary 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..

Beautiful things happen in design, too, but I think only insofar as the design is played. 

So much more austere ugliness comes from design than beauty. 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. 

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 states -- 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.

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 watery things 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.

Games are a literacy.

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).

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. 

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.

[HERMES SMOOTHIES]

Gaming literacy can address our problems.

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?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. 

"Gamification" .. bleghh... :( … The word does have a nice ring to it, though…

As an alternative, how about a more playful means of surfing this zeitgeist: soft gamification. 

Hard gamification (the Normal kind) takes an activity-situation or structure of some sort and stratifies 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").

Soft gamification solves no quantifiable problems; instead, it poses questions. It merely takes an activity/situation, and ADDS DEGREES OF FREEDOM such that it is more malleable (more PLAYED, more of a game). 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!).

Soft gamification can be done like this with everything. It is a means of working with available materials, and OPENING THEM UP, finding more freedom in them, and finding YOUR OWN goals/constraints within those freedoms. 

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):

// rectangle object

rect(100, 100, 400, 400);

// rectangle object (soft-gamified)

rect(100, 100, mouseX, mouseY);

So simple! Just OPENING up a corner to movement. And this could be a ground 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 explore problems, not pretend to solve them).

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 all of your pores (your eyes and ears, too)…

In the Ludic Century, everyone will be a game designer.

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.

[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 music always playing, just as there are no exceptions to the same claim about games. The task is to keep playing.]

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.

Anyone can practice soft gamification at any time. This is to say: you can play everything. If the Ludic Century is going to be a real thing, it won't be defined by everyone being a game designer, but rather everyone being a player-- even designers.

Games are beautiful. They do not need to be justified.

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.

[or rather-- because they are AFFECTING, more generally]

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 agree!

David

:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/:/

3. Talk of Magickians : Post-Human Empathy & Material Sympathies in Computational Alchemy

To return to the question of EMPATHY. This is a big topic-- commenters on Kotaku mention multiplayer games, single-player games with human issues, Journey, etc.

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 representations of humans is necessarily missing out on a lot, perhaps not even beginning to touch the empathetic grain of the medium as well as we might like it to..

It will be instructive to recall a piece of Chris Crawford's game theories--
his proposal that all games are multiplayer.

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 Super Mario Bros. (etc etc),  we must be open to admit every THING with causal influence on a game's outcome to be a player.

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 PLAYERS rather than OBJECTS.

(though of course, the words mean exactly the same thing-- SPACES, SUBSTANCES, too-- they are all situations)

Super Mario Bros., then, is anything but 'single-player.' The game software object itself is another player-- in this sense the game is 2-player, between human player, and line of information (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 whole 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 multiplicity 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.

It is always between players that play happens. Play is always a composition, a mixture, an assemblage of players. And these players need not, by any means, be human. 

Empathy, likewise, happens between players, and these players need not be human.

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...

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?

It cannot be illusory, because it is felt-- it is a physiological fact. Empathy is in the belly. The belly is connected at a distance to the spider, the cat, the game object-- all players, all materials. And, upon connecting the body with the world it is in, the process of computer game development begins to point toward the possibility of a new kind of computational alchemy. 

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 all of its material actuality. 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 material sympathies-- the belief that there is a real affective bond between compositions of chemicals (players, w/ elective affinities) 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 matter-energy and working/playing on the soul. 

The relationship here entailed is simple-- that of causal agents (players) in an activity-situation (game) defined by a scaling multiplicity of players and their interrelations (affects, 'interactions'), wholes (super mario bros.) and parts (goomba, koopa). This looks like Alfred North Whitehead's mereotopological cosmology, which might be worth digging into (Process and Reality, difficult; Modes of Thought, friendly intro)-- at least to see where Bertrand Russel's teacher and Principia collaborator kept tunneling when BR & everyone else's faith seemed to turn to scientific-logical positivity.

Causality is the key-- this is what we are implicated in, we transform the world, and it is what the alchemists called magic. Aleister Crowley's magick formalizes this concept for moderns as the directed action of the Will onto the world. Magick is the more generalized whole of musick, the (ck) seems to mean: CKAUSALITY. Play. Timothy Morton recently wrote an OOO book on this (Realist Magic), and delivers the thesis that the causal realm is the aesthetic realm. 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 viewer's perspective-- aesthetics is only rightly approached from the perspective of creation, without which it cannot exist at all. And creation is IN ALL CASES play between players. Even 'single-player' art is-- the artist and her materials. Composition is the constitution of the unit player, or playspace, 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. 

Play itself, in this sense of always existing as causal influence between players, is always magickal, musickal-- is always an immediate flow of causality, of localized flux, of shifting possibility spaces. Scientifically: play is movement, 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) quality in all materials (ALL PLAYERS), & wholly prior to our structural understanding of them, even while taking into account structural quantities that can be accounted for (that which is consistent, rational, finite).

Pseudoscience will need to be embraced. But not others'-- your own. Here's how: reading pop science (and proper science when it's handy!), pretending we're scientists-- playing with the available materials. 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 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), one which will naturally offend sciences and humanities both (offending the sciences by being pseudoscientific; offending the humanities by dissolving all works of art (objects, artists)).

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 finite-consistent-rational 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 magickal (causal) practices, just as the emergence of "music objects" (compositions) is always a stratification of musickal (improvisatory) practices. 

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 NOT provide instructions as to how we should use these tools-- what to make. The causal burden is on us. This is our alchemical objective reality. 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 listening, and by moving from here. 

...

Ending with an excerpt from Plato, whose secrets have been admired by the Hermetic tradition for ages. Here, a partial account of his too-often downplayed musical  theory of justice, via harmony via motion-gymnastics (body-play, sports & games), 

"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 … "

… and the liquefying danger of too much music without enough gymnasticks (music needs games as much as games need music):

"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!].

4. CODA: Invitation to Dark Play:

"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."

P.S.

Ian Bogost mentioned that he had backed off of Badiou in Alien Phenomenology. This short excerpt, which concludes his critique in that book, is a relevant transition into further studies of played inconsistency / irrationality / infinity:

"In Unit Operations, 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 merely what they do, but things do indeed do things. And the way things do 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; the unit operation is always fractal."

////////////////////////////

Reminder of Tom Lieber's Infinite Sketchpad--

Infinite Sketchpad (iPad)
Infinite Sketches Gallery

Probably the best software that has been released on the iPad, grandmas and luddites all seem to love it. Remarkable magical-material means of studying (IN PLAY) some classic problems 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 Infinite Sketchpad, and I hope to post a draft soon.

Also see:

Infinite Doodle (David Johnston, PC/XBOX)
Doodal (Neil Thapen, Web)

Also see:

cosmicplay.net - (Karen Pohn's play cosmology)

/////////////////////////////

We will need to take that zoomed claim of Bogost's to heart, and to tunnel into this, to really develop the capacity for zooming in so many different ways.... And what do we know of Badiou's event? is it not fractal, too? I'm skipping ahead in the book, but:

"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"