Philosophy
Minesweeper is a wonderful game. It’s a beautiful mixture of fast reflexes, quick logic, guesswork, and general problem solving skills. In addition to being a baneful time waster, it really highlighted for me the incredible way that skill-testing games can produce an altered state of high-functioning consciousness. At a certain level of skill and familiarity with the game, it can actually transform from a linear, mechanical process into something altogether more exciting, even trancelike. Play requires all sorts of cognitive abilities from the user: deductive reasoning, spatial awareness, pattern recognition, and intuition, among other things. But the aggregation of these abilities, in combination with speed and a certain quality of – yes – mindlessness, can produce an incredible mental transformation.
Imagine a utopia in which all human needs are met and all interpersonal problems solved. In such a world, what would we do to pass the time? Three things immediately spring to mind: 1) Sex 2) Art 3) Play Three things immediately spring to mind: 1) Sex 2) Art 3) Play In his 1978 book The Grasshopper Bernard Suits addresses this [...]
Last week I briefly described how games and play help explain Jacques Derrida’s post-structuralist theory. This week I would like to continue on that same topic and focus on just one of Derrida’s neologisms (or, I should say, neographisms, because Derrida valued the written word over the spoken word): différance. Derrida claims that différance is [...]
Last week I discussed how Saussurean structural analysis can be understood in terms of games, and how game strategy can be understood as structural analysis. This week I would like to introduce one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida, and suggest how his notoriously difficult theories can be [...]
Surely Bob Dylan never imagined his classic refrain, “How many roads must a man walk down…” being adapted to the language of video gaming, but here goes: “How many games must a man walk down, before they call him a man?” The answer is probably non-denumerably infinite, but for the sake of brevity I’ll just offer the more reasonable, and decidedly finite, 361! (factorial), which happens to be the number of possible moves extant at the beginning of a game of Go. Now rumour has it that’s a number larger than the total quantity of particles in the entire universe (a figure also exceeded by the possibilities of synaptic combinations in the brain, interestingly enough). What does this tell us?
Why do we play games? The obvious answer, and doubtlessly true, is that we play games in order to be entertained, but that seems altogether too simplistic and easy an answer. The sources of entertainment in our culture are legion; our choices are abundant and ever changing. Why are games rapidly becoming the most lucrative and pervasive form of entertainment in the world? They may not yet have completely usurped the dominance of film and television, but they are quickly gaining ground. Why? What is their appeal to our culture? Does their relevance reside purely on the generic level of Western affluence (which can afford the ostentation of electronic amusement?) Or does it extend beyond civilization, to something innate in what it means to be human, and alive?
Walter Benjamin, in his seminal essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, famously argued that objects of art, with the advent of film, lost the aura of being the direct, unique, and original products of an artist. By following templates, music and film pushed art into a mode of mechanized reproduction; the original became just a model for the production of copies...
Video games occupy a rare and incredible position in culture. They are a relatively new medium that is just beginning to attain a level of almost universal saturation. They are also being made by people with highly developed artistic sensibilities, raising powerful and important questions about their relationship to art. In the recent TEDx talk at USC, Kellee Santiago defends the thesis that video games are art. She does this, perhaps somewhat weakly, by employing an easy Wikipedia definition that states:
Getting a laugh is not the same as being funny, just as getting applause does not mean you have created something great. Yet in our increasingly end-based consumer culture, these distinctions are beginning to blur as never before.
When I was a kid, saying “damn it” would get my mouth washed out with soap. I wasn’t allowed to watch The Simpsons because Bart said “hell.”
"Dude, you totally just Starcrafted my ammo; I am so gonna Mario your mom," says one gamer to another, by way of insult, and thus with a proverbial mesotron rifle places the last, gleaming bolt of missile energy into the exposed forehead of "linguistic integrity". You don't have to be an Oxbridge Grammarian with a pipe permanently glued to your upper lip and whose definition of a "good night with a lady" is an intimate fireside read of Austin to have your forelocks raised in pre-emptive worry about the State of Things...
The world of Taskmaker is a world of 30×30 pixel blocks. Everything in the world is represented by these black-and-white blocks: grass, trees, water, walls, cities, people, monsters, items. Some blocks you can walk over, like the roads and items. Some you bump into, like walls, and people. Some you can walk through, but you [...]
