Bugs: Recent Topics Paging, Uploading Images & Preview (11 Dec 2020)
Recent Topics paging, uploading images and preview bugs require a patch which has not yet been released.
A Seat at the Table: Playtime
- JonathanVolk
- Topic Author
- Offline
- D4
- Chaotically Lawful
Growing up, my mother...
Jonathan Volk returns to try and figure out what play is (and why some of the most playful people we know might opt out of playing games). This is Part 1 of a longer series called A Seat at the Table, which examines the ways we construct and close off our game tables.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
- GorillaGrody
- Offline
- D6
- Will kvetch for free
- Posts: 439
- Thank you received: 742
However, the categories Salen/Zimmerman proposes seem a little soft.(But useful)! What is the nature of their book, Jonathan--is it written for game designers, or is it more of a sociological study?
Have you read (or have I made you read, can't remember) Galloway's Gaming:Essays on Algorithmic Culture? It stretches the idea of cinematic diagesis (what happens within the logic of the narrative space) vs. non-diagetic space (what happens to the observer/player, a category ripe for exploration in a discussion of games, largely ignored or made ideological in other critical forms) in a way that seems, I don't know, a little wonky but sort of interesting.
Also, Jacques Tati (come at me bro) is overrated. Whenever I see him do his little "I don't know how to work a switch do it for me" routine, I think of a French person trying to eat a hamburger and crinkling up their nose. His whole thing is just very, very conservative, to my mind.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
- Michael Barnes
- Offline
- Mountebank
- HYPOCRITE
- Posts: 16929
- Thank you received: 10375
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
- JonathanVolk
- Topic Author
- Offline
- D4
- Chaotically Lawful
Have you read (or have I made you read, can't remember) Galloway's Gaming:Essays on Algorithmic Culture?
Not sure you've recommended this? Now you have me curious.
The Salen/Zimmerman book leads with this:
This, then, is what is at stake: a vast discrepancy between the radical possibilities contained in the medium and the conservative reality of mainstream game development. And this is the way in which Rules of Play is more than a conceptual analysis of what games do; it is also an examination of what they can do, and by extension what they should do. [...] Rules of Play is perhaps the first serious attempt to lay out an aesthetic approach to the design of interactive systems. [...]One person's harmless waste of time might be another's bid for tran-scendence-and games are certainly one of the best examples of how entertainment can be far from simple. In any event, the argument itself molds the subject of this debate. If enough people believe that games are meant to be mindless fun, then this is what they will become. If enough people believe that games are capable of greater things, then they will inevitably evolve and advance
But I want to know more about Tati's conservatism:
Whenever I see him do his little "I don't know how to work a switch do it for me" routine, I think of a French person trying to eat a hamburger and crinkling up their nose. His whole thing is just very, very conservative, to my mind.
Tati's playfulness and humor are so gentle--is "gentle" a synonym for conservatism in the realm of comedy? Mr. Bean is representative of how the bumbling Tati figure evolves, absent a guiding aesthetic intelligence. Tati's movies are gorgeous and they make me grin; they take seriously the bones of cinema (editing and cinematography) as they shuffle through life with, well, no bones to pick.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
- GorillaGrody
- Offline
- D6
- Will kvetch for free
- Posts: 439
- Thank you received: 742
JonathanVolk wrote:
Tati's playfulness and humor are so gentle--is "gentle" a synonym for conservatism in the realm of comedy? Mr. Bean is representative of how the bumbling Tati figure evolves, absent a guiding aesthetic intelligence. Tati's movies are gorgeous and they make me grin; they take seriously the bones of cinema (editing and cinematography) as they shuffle through life with, well, no bones to pick.
One person's gentle is another person's passive aggressive, I suppose. In the sense that I mean it, I think of conservatism in the anti-Modernist sense, and not in the post-modern and fully wacko "build-a-wall" sense. Like, in Mr. Hulot's Holiday, there are all these ridiculous, malfunctioning automated domestic processes going off and making Hulot's life difficult. But the hidden assumption is that someone should be performing those processes (likely women, or low-paid workers). Then, so says Tati, life would be Gallic and humane once again, like in Hulot's day. There is a conservatism at the heart of 1960's hippiedom which on one hand gave us kill-the-poor libertarianism, and which on the other hand gave us the environmental movement. So it's a mixed bag, like Tati's movies. I find Tati's movies beautiful, too. It's been a while since I revisited them, and this is encouraging me to see them again.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
- GorillaGrody
- Offline
- D6
- Will kvetch for free
- Posts: 439
- Thank you received: 742
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
- GorillaGrody
- Offline
- D6
- Will kvetch for free
- Posts: 439
- Thank you received: 742
JonathanVolk wrote:
The Salen/Zimmerman book leads with this:
This, then, is what is at stake: a vast discrepancy between the radical possibilities contained in the medium and the conservative reality of mainstream game development. And this is the way in which Rules of Play is more than a conceptual analysis of what games do; it is also an examination of what they can do, and by extension what they should do. [...] Rules of Play is perhaps the first serious attempt to lay out an aesthetic approach to the design of interactive systems. [...]One person's harmless waste of time might be another's bid for tran-scendence-and games are certainly one of the best examples of how entertainment can be far from simple. In any event, the argument itself molds the subject of this debate. If enough people believe that games are meant to be mindless fun, then this is what they will become. If enough people believe that games are capable of greater things, then they will inevitably evolve and advance
Back on topic: I'm ordering this immediately. I feel like there isn't enough serious writing about this massive part of the culture that isn't also niche-level academic.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
- JonathanVolk
- Topic Author
- Offline
- D4
- Chaotically Lawful
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.