reading, playing, writing
for this week (and perhaps a few more), i want to do a phd year 2 week x readings & games issue.
it's weekend 1. for week 2 i have 509 pages to read, two browser games to play, a couple of pages to write, and prep for teaching. it's all so very exciting (i say this without even a pinch of sarcasm!).
the deeper i get into my phd journey, the more i lose the definition of what a text is. which also means, it's a rather fresh opportunity to expand this un-defining to the experience of doing any of it. if a text can be a game & a game can be a shift, then reading is a thing i'm earning my livelihood for, playing is a thing i'm earning my livelihood with, & writing is the only one nobody's paying for at all. so. writing is the part i'm least willing to call by its name. [not talking about actual money jsyk].
i don't have an argument in this piece of writing you're about to read. may be some will in the coming weeks. i won't do it every week (i'm not that ambitious). not reviews, not notes exactly. more like an accounting of the week's inputs before they get metabolized into something with citations.
spoilers everywhere btw idc
i. game studies
say hello to my game studies peers! they're here reading this! <3
the pairing of the two readings we had to do [the first unit of rules of play (rp) by salen & zimmerman and marc leblanc's essay "tools for creating dramatic game dynamics"] looks like they disagree about hidden information but there's something useful when they're read as a team. rp, in "defining digital games' worries about concealed logic, which is when a digital system hides how it works, the perception stage of a choice breaks down and the player acts arbitrarily. leblanc's fog of war conceals state, like where the opponent is, how much is left; inside rules the player already knows. different objects, and a game can do one without doing the other.
the browser game we were prescribed is a dark room by doublespeak games. it is interesting because it splits them: its state is almost aggressively legible. stores are numbered, each worker row shows what it produces and consumes, a wilderness run gives you hp & water counts. what the game does hide is the shape of its own possibility space. what buttons will exist ten minutes from now? arbitrariness in rp means acting without perceptible consequence. here every click returns a legible change. the fire is roaring. builder says she can make a cart for carrying wood. while the map of available actions stays dark. consequence without a horizon, which is a different condition than the one they warn about, and maybe not a failure at all.
this is where the material medium argument earns its keep. immediate but narrow interactivity is the trait doing the most work (gather wood, wood deposited, light fire, room is hot) and that constraint is precisely what makes the arrival of a second button an event. information manipulation here operates on the interface rather than on fiction: the game edits its own menu while you watch. a physical system can only approximate that, and clumsily, through sealed envelopes and legacy-style components. meanwhile automated complex systems keep the village producing while i'm out on the dusty path (or on my second screen, doing the reading for contemporary us fic), so the part i can't see is still running, gathering, making itself useful for future me.
i realized that both the runs i've done of this game (from last year's ta-ing and this course) i've especially noticed what the browser version withholds and never returns to. leblanc's uncertainty is who will win!, which doesn't transfer cleanly because there's no opponent; the question becomes closer to what is this and what am i inside it. that information is moral rather than tactical, and the web version never delivers it as an event. (ok being honest here, i thought i was building/running a cult and we were about to do something ridiculous). there is no moment where the game informs me i am a wanderer of an invading force that stripped this planet. i assemble it from alien alloy, a repeated word, a crashed ship, an old man in a swamp calling his exile penance. the mobile version does stage an event though (3/10 recommend the mobile version): it will relabel your villagers as slaves if you keep overworking them (but that's rajan's addition and not townsend's). the browser version leaves things unspoken, unenforced.
what i want to ask for the next class (and my subs here <3): is withheld understanding still meaningful play? rp seems to want me to grasp the system while i am acting inside it, a dark room asks me to act first and construct the understanding afterward, out of fragments – that too only if i bother to. that might be something richer than meaningful play. it might also be a well-decorated version of exactly the failure they describe.
[ok by the end it feels like im also talking about disco elysium, but i think i should be forgiven anytime i bring it up, thx] [see, it's a methodological edge! if any opaque system can be defended by saying the opacity is thematic, the concept stops being able to fair, which means it stops being able to describe anything. but this is about dark room]
ii. new media labor
this is an independent study i am doing (which i will make a whole other post about). the readings are intense, and it will progress from theoretical approaches like semiotics, structuralism, race, psychoanalysis to new media. this week's readings are focused on concept, category, cognition. i have done two readings (out of five) for it right now (more like 1.5): deleuze & guattari, excerpts from what is philosophy, and the essay "concepts and cognitive science" from concepts: core readings. here, i will only talk about d&g's piece (for now) (might update).
every time i read d&g, i want to throw the paper across the table before i think about a sentence. but i was reading on my ipad and there's no way i'd do that.
first of all, they absolutely refuse to define anything by telling you what it is. their form of argument and definition is their form, which i, sure, love because that's what i want to do as well. it's like derrida: how's the language and the whole put together? what's it next to? and hey stupid reader: what's the whole argument then?
the claim: every concept has components, the components are what define it. multiplicity. nothing arrives whole, nothing arrives from nothing. (even the concept a philosophy "begins" with is already at least double because the beginning itself has to be a concept...& who decided that).
a calm field. & a frightened face looms up looking at something outside the frame. the other person here isn't a subject or an object, they're a possible world, the possibility of a frightening one at that. it is expressed, exists only in its expression. three components are inseparable here: a possible world, existing face, real language. ipad screen is down now, it's just me sitting with that scene. what is it? a cutscene? it's the camera cutting to someone's face reacting to what you can't see yet. the horror grammar of the offscreen. the face is a megaphone for words that haven't happened.
d&g describe things casually, propositions "force intensive ordinates into spatiotemporal and energetic coordinates." linearizing. they take something whose components were inseparable & lay it on an axis so it can be made to correspond to other things on other axes. independence of variables against the inseparability of variations.
which is, what i think, a working unstable definition of what a category is and why it isn't a concept. a category can be joined to other categories, it can be counted, it has to give up its zones of indiscernibility to do that. the whole point of a threshold is that you can't say where a it stops & b starts, & you cannot build a dashboard on that.
love: the concept of anenergentic. we love making up words, i do too <3. anyway. it has no energy, only intensities once it's been deployed and nullified in an extensive state of affairs. nullified. [i don't think they meant that as a labor theory but i'm going to read it as one regardless here. the extensive state of affairs is where the intensity goes to be spent. and flattened. and made legible as output].
when the platform sorts you into a tier, a rating, a completion rate, a risk, is it thinking or is it only ever linearizing? d&g might (would, may) say concepts get created for problems that are badly posed. the metric isn't really badly posed though. it's not posed at all. it just arrives already extensive, already correspondent. something is in living inside a coordinate that was never a concept & pretending the zones were never there.
thanks for reading, see you next time byeeeee
