Re: [-empyre-] PLAY Tlönic

[Christian McCrea]

Jon,

 some thoughts on discourse... the space of games is possessed by a
whole range of conflicting influences which are competing for the coin
of the realm, legitimacy. I feel (I suppose only as player and
visitor) that art games and games art (as opposed to game art + the
art game - phew!) are competing with galleries themselves, who 'game'
their interfaces and space, with Universities who make serious games,
with governments who excuse policy with interactive marketing.

Some games art (Rebecca Cannon's The Buff and the Brutal, Brody
Condon's White/Picnic/Glitch) is a sort of tipping over of the tables,
a discourse beginning with those same aesthetics as the games, and
mutilating/mutating them. So my first answer would be by disrupting
flow; second would be by multiplying the pleasure of recognition.

Taking these two things together, it seems that games art takes
pleasure from recognition and farms it to produce what games can never
be - legitmate. The paradox is endlessly fruitful but also tied down
in all sorts of other nonsense - how do you then make meaning... but
games art's visibility as productive experimentality is positively
lethal to technological orthodoxy. Whether the miasma of productive
game interventions, mods, crafts, etc is discourse or drone is
debatable. ...

This gets us nowhere near aesthetics, however. Can game aesthetics be
made to do things that other types and media aesthetics cannot?

-Christian McCrea