Anyone else trying to figure out where some of these words even came from…?

I understood a decent amount of the reading from Galloway, but a lot of the lingo made things hard to understand. I felt like I was able to get the gist of what he was trying to say due to the context, but after as more and more words I had never even seen came into the picture, this became harder as the reading went on. The concepts that he is getting across could be explained in simpler terms in my opinion, but since he is obviously not writing to appeal to a casual audience, it makes sense why he uses the language that he does. Below is an example of a passage I found confusing:

“One example is multithreading and object oriented programming that creates the conditions of possibility for certain formal outcomes in the game. When one plays State of Emergency, the swarm effect of rioting is a formal action enacting by the game on the experience of gameplay and incorporated into the game’s narrative. Yet the formal quality of swarming as such is still nondiegetic to the extent that it finds its genesis primarily in the current logic of informatics (emergence, social networks, artificial life, and so on) rather than in any necessary element in the narrative, itself enlisted to “explain” and incorporate this nondiegetic force into the story line (a riot) after the fact.” (32-33)

I can take enough out of this passage to talk about it, but not to explain what exactly he means.. I think that what he doing is explaining a way that game developers program certain scenarios to seem somewhat random, even though they aren’t, but I could also be totally off because I get lost in his rhetoric. I did enjoy much of the reading though (the parts that I understood at least), and was happy that I recognized/had played many of the games that he mentioned throughout the chapter.

Atmosphere and diegesis in games

The G-Man in the opening sequence of Half-Life 2.

I’m not going to lie. When we were first assigned Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture and Professor Mark “Sample Reality” Sample insisted multiple times that it’d be the hardest thing we read in college, I groaned. I assumed I would just sort of skim through the reading and pull a response out of my ass, because that’s what I’m good at. I was going to write, “You know what I don’t understand? THIS ENTIRE BOOK, it’s a load of shite!” I haven’t read any other students’ blogs on the reading, but I’m sure that was the basic thesis of multiple posts.

Against all my better judgement, I found myself actually enjoying Alexander R. Galloway’s first chapter. Real references to real video games, from cult classics like Ico to my favorite game of all time, the masterpiece Metroid Prime (which came out in 2002 on the GameCube, and is not to be confused with its 1986 NES predecessor Metroid, as Professor Mark “Sample Reality” Sample seems to have done in response to one of my previous blog posts).

A couple things caught my eye about the reading. First of all, since I’m a film major, I loved the idea of diegesis and non-diegesis in video games. I never thought of this before, but it’s very important to how players approach a game. One of my favorite games as a kid was Command & Conquer: Red Alert, a real-time strategy game that relied, as RTSes mostly do, on completely non-diegetic gameplay. While having no affect on the quality of the gameplay itself, it definitely made it harder to become as emotionally involved in the story and the characters as, say, Half-Life 2, which is 100% diagetic in its interaction with players. Both are great games, but I get much more emotionally invested in the Half-Life series.

Metroid Prime is an interesting case, because its seemingly non-diegetic elements are, in fact, diegetic.

A snowy vista in Metroid Prime. Note the diegetic HUD.

There is a very prominent HUD in the game, but it’s inside the visor of Samus’ helmet. The icons to denote switching weapons and whatnot are actually within the world of the game. When Samus gets wet, water droplets drip down the screen. When there is a blast near her face, you can see the reflection of her visage in the visor. But she never speaks. She is alone on an alien world, and the player is immersed in it through (mostly) diegetic gameplay.

I was also drawn to Galloway’s concept of “ambient acts” in video games: that in many games, when the player just sits back and doesn’t do anything, the game continues on its own, playing itself in a way. The world of the game exists even when the player doesn’t interact with it. There’s a certain zen to this idea. On a basic level, it’s a microcosm for real life–when the hero does nothing, Earth is extant. People go on their daily routines, the sun sets, day turns to night, and night turns to day. In a way, regardless of all the power-ups we’ve got, we don’t matter at all.

I know I didn’t really talk about anything I didn’t understand in the reading, but I thought this would suffice.

Reading Galloway…and trying to understand him.

I have difficulty trying to grasp the definitions of diegetic and nondiegetic. On page 7 and 8, Galloway attempts to define the two terms stating that nondiegetic are “game elements that are inside the total gamic apparatus yet outside the portion of the appartus that constitutes a pretend world of character and story.”

I take these sentences to mean that nondiegesis is like add some scenery put into a game that has no real affect on how the game is played or how the player feels when he plays the game. But, he goes on to say that “the heads-up display (HUD) in Deus Ex is nondiegetic, while the various rooms and environments in the game are diegetic” (page 8).

This confuses me. I think that I sort of get the definition of diegesis and nondiegesis but then as I read on, I’m just more and more confused. I keep having to go back to those pages (pages 7-10) to make sure I’ve got my definitions right (and I probably don’t!).

I don’t know. I feel as though I would understand his writing a lot more if he hadn’t gone on and on about some of the things he said and put in a lot of fluff that really meant nothing to me.

RE: Reading Galloway

My biggest confusion was actually not a passage written by Galloway, but a passage Galloway quotes by Jacques Derrida on page 26:

“If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field – that is, language and a finite language – excludes totalization: this field is in effect that of a game [jeu], that is to say, of a field of infinite substitutions in the closing of finite group. This field only allows these infinite substitutions because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an incommensurable field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions.”

Infinite, finite, that is to say – every time I try to puzzle out the meaning of these sentences, my mind starts turning in circles. I feel like the information he is trying to convey is important, but the convoluted sentence structure is hiding its meaning from me. Without understanding a passage which Galloway quotes to support his argument, I have no hope of fully understanding Galloway’s argument.

Reading Galloway

Galloway, Page 16-17

I couldn’t really identify a key phrase in this section, besides maybe configuration, and I thought that was too vague, so I have included the direct quote:

“Acts of configuration are the rendering of life; the transformation into an information economy in the United States since the birth of videogames as a mass medium in the 1970’s has precipitated mass upheavals in the lives of individuals submitted to a process of retraining and redeployment into a new economy mediated by machines and other informatic artifacts… the same quantitative modulations and numerical valuations required by the new information worker and thus observed in a dazzling array of new cultural phenomena, from the cut-up sampling culture of hip-hop to the calculus curves of computer aided architectural design.”

I’m a little confused about what Galloway is trying to say in this section. It seems that he is saying that the new technology, of videogames specifically, basically forced people into learning new configurations- configurations that were confusing and entirely new to them (forcing them into upheaval? really?). Later on in the passage, Galloway says, “To live today is to know how to use menus.” I think I understand his basic concept but am missing the significance of his argument.

As far as the second sentence I’ve included, I can’t even dissect it into something I can remotely understand. How can numerical valuations be observed as cultural phenomena? That seems completely unrelated and irrelevant. I have no idea what Galloway is trying to say here!

Verbing Weirds Language

It seems to me Galloway has some interesting ideas, but he has an almost dyslexic difficulty trying to express them simply.  As the wise Bill Watterson once said, “verbing weirds language”.

With most of the first chapter, I could read slowly and sort of squint my way through what he was trying to get at through context, but my biggest problem was the cosmic “Why?”.  Diegetic?  Nondiegetic?  Operator?  Machine?  I think I understand the concepts, I think I see the spectrum, but I don’t see where he’s going with it or even a potential practical use for it.  In class we’ve already discussed some, in my opinion, fairly useful ways to categorize and analyze games, but this guy’s gone to a whole new level of abstract inaccessibility.

This hasn’t put me off the book, far from it, in fact.  Now I’m curious to see what he can accomplish with all this verbose babble.

Re: Reading Galloway

Citation: Galloway, Page 5.

Quote: “Video games create their own grammars of action; the game controller provides the primary physical vocabularies for humans to pantomime these gestural games”.

Not knowing how to even start interpreting this quote, please find questions and a primitive analysis below.

Grammar, as defined in the New Oxford American English Dictionary, is “the basic elements in an area of knowledge or skill”. Action is defined as “the fact or process of doing something”. Thus a “grammar of action” is seemingly knowing how to complete the process of ‘doing something’.

Is this thought process evenly slightly correct? What does “primary physical vocabularies for humans to pantomime these gestural games” mean? How does all of this become “code”? Basically, what the heck is this guy talking about?

Reading Galloway

Here’s what I want you to do after you’ve read the chapter on “Gamic Action, Four Moments” in Gaming. Cite one passage (give the page number and a key phrase or two from the passage) that totally confuses you and describe your confusion on the blog.

Chunking & Aging

This has absolutely nothing to do with video games– absolutely nothing– so Professor Sample, please feel free to delete it if you’d like.

I was just reading this article on why life seems to go by faster as you get older: linky linky linky~ The middly bit made me think of this class.

“Of course, you can see this in everyday life,” says Eagleman, “when you drive to your new workplace for the first time and it seems to take a really long time to get there. But when you drive back and forth to your work every day after that, it takes no time at all, because you’re not really writing it down anymore. There’s nothing novel about it.”

This seemed really similar to the “chunking” process that Koster introduced in the earlier chapters. Apparently chunking really does happen in everyday life, outside of video games, and it’s also what makes time seem to go by faster when you’re old. You’ve already chunked everything, and are just repeating it over and over… (like Every Day the Same Dream?). Interesting.

Sensawunda in games: Small Worlds

Raph Koster writes profusely about the different sorts of ways people feel good, and one of these that struck my fancy was “sensawunda,” or aesthetic appreciation. Unlike many games, in which various sorts of “fun” makes us feel good, sensawunda is a delight in awe, mystery, and harmony. It’s looking at a beautiful painting or sharing a smile with a stranger you pass in the stairwell.

With the sort of arty flash games Professor Mark “Sample Reality” Sample has been having us play, I couldn’t help but think of a number of video games that accomplish this. A recent favorite of mine is Small Worlds, a fairly short (maybe 10-15 minutes) game crated by David Shute in which the player explores, well… small worlds.

At first, the game seems extremely pixelated, but as the player explores the map, it continues to zoom out and reveal a bigger picture. In the end, the game makes a subtle statement about society which I’ll leave for you to discover. Beautiful music accomplanies the gameplay, so I’d suggest making sure your speaker volume is at a good level.

The crux of the “sensawunda” in Small Worlds is that while the player is technically playing the game, there is no way to win, lose, die, or gain points. It’s more of an experience than a true “game” in the traditional sense of the word. The “fun” in Small Worlds for the player doesn’t come from earning power-ups or killing enemies, but from revealing the game world and taking in the beautiful imagery (along with the music).

The “are video games art?” argument is futile. Games aren’t categorized as “art” or “not art.” It’s a spectrum. On one end is “games,” such as Monopoly and baseball. On the other end is “art,” such as books and movies. Video games all fall on different places in this spectrum. Small Worlds is much closer to the “art” end–while retaining elements of games, it’s in no way a game like Pac-Man is a game. And that’s not a bad thing. We need more independent game developers to create pieces like Small World that take advantage of the medium to actually say something about the world around us.

Exactly how much do videogames effect us.

This is in response to Jamie’s post.  Videogame violence was once one of the most pressing issues for parents and how they raised their children.  The stigma that videogames would cause your children to become violent offenders did effect what games parents bought their kids if they decided to at all.  Recent studies have disproven this theory but not befoere parents had made their decision to keep their kids away from videogames.  What people how believe this kind of theory don’t realize how much violence videogames have had in them since their beginning.  Violence has been a primary factor in many types of videogames and will continue to be for the length of their existence.  The reason for this is because our society and many others are based around violence and have been for centuries and that has simply translated into videogames.  Violence had been incorporated into movies and music long before videogames had been invented and there had been no significant attempt to discredit them.  The movement started very suddenly and ended just as abruptly.  They did not complain when space invaders came out and it seems that the movement really gained momentum when grand theft auto started to take off.  I know that my parents refused to buy me videogames because they thought that I should play outside more instead of wasting my time on videogames.

Make or Miss

As 2 feet of snow piled up outside, I had nothing to do (well not really) but to play NBA Live 2009 on my PC. This game, which has no story and any new patterns for me to discover, still keeps me entertained day after day. As I ran a fastbreak, I pulled up to shoot a 3-pointer with Kobe. Swish!! After a while, same situation, same play, yet not the same result. This is nothing unusual about sports game, but having discussed game codes, game consoles and such, I paused to wonder what kind of complicated game codes must be behind this. All of a sudden I can see how game developers used geometry, advanced algebra and complicated probabilities to make this game such life-like. The codes for Pacman was about 1/4 of a page, and imagine how much coding required just to have a player running down the court while his shorts swayed from side to side. It also made me realize that the shots that I am attempting are all based on the player’s “artificial skills.” Realizing that kind of made the game boring and less exciting to play (not for long since I soon stopped thinking and continued playing). . The different aspects of the game are significantly realistic, however, no one can ever deny that its a game. Crazy dunks, weired fouls, and strange moves keeps the game a game. If the game became too realistic, then i dont think it would be as fun anymore. I am not talking about the graphics, which could always improve. I am talking about the way players act, the limitations of moves and probability that someone random making shots. If they become too realistic, then people would never substitute their key players and never really play the “simulation” they want to play.

As we discuss more and more about different genres of games, the games that I play on a daily basis are becoming more and more artificial and academic. Taking about games provides great knowledge behind the scenes of games but affects how I play and enjoy games 🙁

Probabilities of Probabilities

After reviewing the source code from Micropolis in class, one of the things that struck me the most was just how few lines of code made up the entirety of the original Sim City.  Now yes, the original Sim City was never known to be the most graphically intensive games, and playing it now the game seems quaint in relation to modern video games, but it still is impressive to see an entire game’s workings broken down into mere lines of code.  Even without knowledge of the C++ programming language, it is clear what certain code does and how specific actions taken during the game can change the outcome of later events.

The other thing that most impressed me, which we went over in class, was the specificity involved in the events which occur in-game.  When playing a video game, one doesn’t stop to think, “Well there must be a 23.5% probability for this enemy to die once he is shot in the chest,” one just shoots.  But when it comes down to it, every single in game action is governed by such probabilities, and thus games can really be looked at as giant math equations (something which gives me a headache).  Thankfully, these game programmer decisions are never revealed to the user, as not only would they be confusing and disorienting, but they would remove a level of fun and excitement from the game if everything were simply spelled out.

Don’t Look Back

I don’t mean to be repetitive, but as you all already know, videogames just aren’t my “thing.”  That being the case, I find myself putting, what I consider to be, way too much time and energy into the videogames we are assigned to play.  You would all laugh if you watched me die over and over and over again, but I continue to play anyway in order to reach a higher level of understanding.  This last game we were assigned to play, Don’t Look Back, I found to be quite interesting.  I could tell there was some sort of story line it was following, but I did not pick up on it right away.  Granted, this could be because after playing for half an hour I only made it through a quarter of the game.  Therefore, I first found a youtube video that took me through the whole game (so if you are like me you can click here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kVFEeazPkA

and watch the entire game unfold).  Then, I found an article describing the basis or story line of the game.  So here

is just another game that, according to the article, (although it is not blatantly obvious) contradicts Aarseth.  Personally, I enjoyed this article because it reassured me that this game was more than just a game.