[-empyre-] The Playsthetics of Experimental Digital Games: Week 1 Featured Guests and Questions

Thu Mar 6 03:14:45 EST 2014

So much to respond to!

I think that the Experimental Game Play question is a good one, but the
problem I find with "zeroing" in on specific sets of experimentation (in an
ongoing contemporary sense), is that it omits larger histories of
experimentation, both in the game play, and the game design perspective.
 There is a great deal of experimentation occuring in all these facets of
the medium and culture that i'm wary to be overly reductive, and yet also
wary to be over-inclusive in our defintions of what constitutes
"experimental games". I think that the definition of the GDC workshops
omits other kinds of experiments, which are worth noting. Felan got to the
heart of this when discussing how game makers who feel largely marginalized
are creating work outside of our understanding of what would constitute
experimental games, where the practice itself can be seen as a critical
intervention into other forms of experimentation that have been privileged
thus far in this indie/ experimental/ art game narrative.

I've been thinking a lot about the linguistic tomfoolery that we're all
guilty of when we enter into discussions about these kinds of works, and
have done a bit of work trying to unpack what all the various terms we've
adopted mean, who is using them, how they are being employed and how we can
"zero in" (as Bart says) on the various shapes and forms of experimentation
we're seeing within this big muddy mess. I say game art (borrowed from
Matteo Bittani's definition of artists who USE games in their creative
practices, a term which has been viewed as contentious) to outline how
contemporary artists employ games (and their technologies) in their work.
These forms of experimentation differ a great deal from a more starting
from the ground-up approach of art game makers who build their own games.
Felan called this "game-based artwork", and under this umbrella falls
art-modding, console art, etc. We have art-games, which largely comes from
the perspective of the indie game world, which highlight games that offer
different (dare we say more experimental) fare than of other independently
produced games). Tales of Tales and their "not-games" definition muddies
the waters even further, and then there's the italian concept of
"neo-ludica", etc.

Bart's right in that we need to hone in on these concepts, but Felan's also
correct I think in that we need to tease out the myriad of differences here
and discuss them in their own contexts. We're in this strange state as
scholars where the language we employ about these forms of "art" and
"experimentation" often differ from the manners in which the same terms are
employed by practitioners. Which often differ from the various "scenes"
which exist in Indie/indie/DIY/ art game making.

Bennett Foddy gave this talk @ Indiecade:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/211754/Bennett_Foddy_talks_about_the_history_of_indie_at_Indiecade_East.php

which i think is trying to do similar work to what the three of us are
discussing here. So many people employing the same terms, which mean
different things, or creating new terms in order to further delineate and
specify the nature of their practices. But what seems to be emerging more
than anything else, is how the term experimental, no matter how it is
deployed, seems to be pointing to an oppositional postion: experimental as
compared to X, experimental as resistance to Y.

I hope this all makes sense to everyone. Took me a while just to pour
through Bart and Felan's comments and work out this response.

s.

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 10:35 AM, Felan Parker <felan.parker at hotmail.com>wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I was wondering how long it would be before we came around to the
> Experimental Gameplay Project! That definition is pretty fascinating, and
> draws clear battle-lines between what is seen to be experimental in AAA
> titles (technical innovation, fictional worlds, etc.) as compared to
> smaller-scale indie games. In a more subtle way, though, it also draws a
> line between what I would describe as the dominant conception of indie and
> other emergent game-making practices that don't necessarily fit within this
> conception of indie and/or experimentation. From the paper I wrote to
> accompany the "Indie Game Studies" workshop Bart and I organized at last
> year's DiGRA conference:
>
> "The mainstreaming of a particular, narrow vision of indie games demands
> more in-depth analyses that highlight the complexities of indie gaming --
> [most] non-commercial, not-for- profit, activist, and amateur games, for
> example, are all written out of this narrative. This tension over the right
> to define what "counts" as an indie game has manifested in a kind of
> localized culture war. Anna Anthropy's Rise of the Videogame Zinesters
> (2012b), for example, locates true independence in highly personal, amateur
> game design that is modeled on print zines and independent comics.
> Similarly, the recent controversy regarding the formal status of the new
> wave of "zinester" games as "games" (in particular small, personal games
> produced by women, queer and trans* people, often using accessible software
> like Game Maker, Stencyl, and Twine) demonstrates the instability of this
> dominant conception of indie, not to mention the contours of its ideology
> (see Ligman 2013 for a summary of this debate)."
>
> I would argue that there's something kind of hegemonic about Experimental
> Gameplay, especially as its relationship to AAA production has stabilized
> as Bart argues, constituted in the particular sector of indie gaming
> culture it represents. The stipulations against "Novel content" and "games
> for under-served audiences" suggests that Twine games like porpentine's
> Howling Dogs and Soha El-Sabaawi's Penalties don't necessarily count as
> experimental in this context, but I would argue these games are
> experimental and radical in their appropriation and hybridization of
> familiar text adventure/hypertext conventions to articulate narrative
> "content" that is exceedingly rare in video games. The distinction
> Experimental Gameplay draws between "core gameplay" and everything else is
> pragmatic in this sense, as it is used to draw clear boundaries between
> different kinds of game-making.
>
> What we've seen in recent years with the rise of a diverse range of
> zinester/queer/feminist/radical/punk/DIY/amateur/whatever indie games is a
> community or assemblage that positions itself against BOTH the mainstream
> industry AND this hegemonic conception of indie (which, as demonstrated by
> cultural texts like Indie Game: The Movie and Us and the Game Industry, is
> still overwhelmingly white, straight, and male). The recently-launched game
> criticism journal The Arcade Review presents a different vision of
> experimental games and is designed to sustain this new art world assemblage:
>
> "We publish criticism on experimental games, and writing on craft,
> aesthetic, structure and narrative. What qualifies as an experimental game?
> If you think it's an experimental game, then it's probably an experimental
> game. We're particularly interested in freeware games, cheaper indie games
> (less than $20.00CAD or so) and stable emulatable titles. It's important
> the game you want to write about is easily accessible to the low budget. We
> also lean towards games infrequently written on."
>
> Now, this isn't a particularly useful definition, but I think it clearly
> reflects the divide I describe above between dominant indie games (ie:
> small-scale commercial games) and this diverse new wave. I guess what I'm
> saying is that we need to talk about experimental gameplay(s), rather than
> Experimental Gameplay.
>
> So, uh, I didn't get around to addressing Bart's salient final questions,
> but I'll save that for subsequent posts once we hear from Skot again.
>
> This is fun!
> Felan
>
> Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2014 09:37:54 -0500
> From: simonb at algol.concordia.ca
> To: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] The Playsthetics of Experimental Digital Games:
> Week 1 Featured Guests and Questions
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
> On 3/4/2014 11:38 PM, Felan Parker wrote: > > Skot raises an important
> point that all kinds of games have been > experimental in some sense at
> many points in the history of the form, > and experimentation isn't
> something that can be mapped on to any one > sector of game development.
> Again, I think we need to look to specific > contexts to undestand what it
> means for games to be experimental. Er... sorry for my mispost yesterday,
> it has indeed been a while :) Great opening round of thoughts but now how
> shall we zero in without just generating conceptual confusion and/or chaos?
> Sandra's opening remarks make me think that she is after 'experimental
> games' as both an analytic category and a genre category (ha... wouldn't it
> be nifty to see experimental games as a category in Metacritic). If the
> rest of us start picking at this by showing how all games are experimental
> in some context then we have our work cut out for us showing what is, and
> is not, experimental. Its also a bit of hubris I think to deny experimental
> games their cultural historical place in the sun. Concretely then, the term
> experimental games makes an important appearance in the context of the
> shifting politics of the IGDA Game Developer's Conference. The website for
> the Experimental Gameplay Workshops series is telling - "This IS
> Experimental Gameplay: Creating unexpected play experiences or promoting
> unique feelings within players through mechanics (Gravitation, Passage, The
> Marriage). Generative games, where the gameplay or world changes based on
> choices the player makes (Spelunky, flOw). Emergent gameplay, where the
> game systems interact to provide suprising situations (ROM CHECK FAIL,
> Portal). Interactive storytelling, where the plot or dialog changes in a
> fine-grained manner, as opposed to discrete "branching points" (Facade).
> Innovative user interfaces -- natural language processing, image
> recognition, gestural control, new hardware devices (Guitar Hero, RENGA).
> Novel multiplayer interactions (Journey) This is NOT Experimental Gameplay:
> Novel content, narrative, settings, character designs, artwork, audio or
> plots -- unless they affect the core gameplay in a major way. New hybrids
> of already-existing genres -- unless the resulting gameplay is unexpectedly
> more than the sum of its parts. Purely technical innovation, experimental
> business models or distribution mechanisms, or games for under-served
> audiences -- unless the game itself is experimental as outlined above."
> (see http://www.experimental-gameplay.org/) I like this definition
> actually mostly because it privileges gameplay and not game design as such.
> Yet the history of these workshops from 2002 also tells the tale of
> upheaval in the game industry (at least as represented by GDC) and a
> growing dissatisfaction with the market determined design imperatives of
> the major game studios. What's interesting to me is that this definition is
> also normal paradigm defining and provides both players and designers with
> a language for orienting themselves to what can be perceived as industry
> imperatives. Experimental Gameplay is first and foremost a rhetoric (or
> narrative frame) for collective action. Indeed, experimentation in the
> context of the big money AAA studios is now harder to conceive of, in part,
> because of these workshops. There is a nice case study waiting to be
> written on Ubisoft Montreal's 'Child of Light' project (
> http://childoflight.ubi.com/col/en-GB/home/index.aspx) in the sense that
> it has been cynically read as an attempt to cash in on the indie mystique
> and an ethos of experimentation. Who doesn't love experimentation? That
> should worry us. This totally fits with Felan's art worlds model but the
> next step is to articulate how the actual practice of experimental gameplay
> supports (or not) existing and yet-to-exist mobilizations. Obviously,
> experimental gameplay is a lovely rubric for indie self-fashioning and even
> relative economic success (and this is how the experimental gameplay
> workshops have evolved) but is there more too it than this? cheers, Bart --
> ================================================= Bart Simon, Associate
> Professor of Sociology Director, Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG)
> Concordia University, Montreal bart.simon [at] concordia.ca
> http://www.tag.hexagram.ca=================================================
> On 3/4/2014 11:38 PM, Felan Parker wrote:
>
>
>  Skot raises an important point that all kinds of games have been
> experimental in some sense at many points in the history of the form, and
> experimentation isn't something that can be mapped on to any one sector of
> game development. Again, I think we need to look to specific contexts to
> undestand what it means for games to be experimental.
>
>
> Er... sorry for my mispost yesterday, it has indeed been a while :)
>
> Great opening round of thoughts but now how shall we zero in without just
> generating conceptual confusion and/or chaos?  Sandra's opening remarks
> make me think that she is after 'experimental games' as both an analytic
> category and a genre category (ha... wouldn't it be nifty to see
> experimental games as a category in Metacritic).  If the rest of us start
> picking at this by showing how all games are experimental in some context
> then we have our work cut out for us showing what is, and is not,
> experimental.
>
> Its also a bit of hubris I think to deny experimental games their cultural
> historical place in the sun. Concretely then, the term experimental games
> makes an important appearance in the context of the shifting politics of
> the IGDA Game Developer's Conference. The website for the Experimental
> Gameplay Workshops series is telling -
>
> "This IS Experimental Gameplay: Creating unexpected play experiences or
> promoting unique feelings within players through mechanics (Gravitation,
> Passage, The Marriage). Generative games, where the gameplay or world
> changes based on choices the player makes (Spelunky, flOw). Emergent
> gameplay, where the game systems interact to provide suprising situations
> (ROM CHECK FAIL, Portal). Interactive storytelling, where the plot or
> dialog changes in a fine-grained manner, as opposed to discrete "branching
> points" (Facade). Innovative user interfaces - natural language processing,
> image recognition, gestural control, new hardware devices (Guitar Hero,
> RENGA). Novel multiplayer interactions (Journey)
>
> This is NOT Experimental Gameplay: Novel content, narrative, settings,
> character designs, artwork, audio or plots - unless they affect the core
> gameplay in a major way. New hybrids of already-existing genres - unless
> the resulting gameplay is unexpectedly more than the sum of its parts.
> Purely technical innovation, experimental business models or distribution
> mechanisms, or games for under-served audiences - unless the game itself is
> experimental as outlined above." (see
> http://www.experimental-gameplay.org/)
>
>
> I like this definition actually mostly because it privileges gameplay and
> not game design as such. Yet the history of these workshops from 2002 also
> tells the tale of upheaval in the game industry (at least as represented by
> GDC) and a growing dissatisfaction with the market determined design
> imperatives of the major game studios.  What's interesting to me is that
> this definition is also normal paradigm defining and provides both players
> and designers with a language for orienting themselves to what can be
> perceived as industry imperatives.  Experimental Gameplay is first and
> foremost a rhetoric (or narrative frame) for collective action.  Indeed,
> experimentation in the context of the big money AAA studios is now harder
> to conceive of, in part, because of these workshops.  There is a nice case
> study waiting to be written on Ubisoft Montreal's 'Child of Light' project (
> http://childoflight.ubi.com/col/en-GB/home/index.aspx) in the sense that
> it has been cynically read as an attempt to cash in on the indie mystique
> and an ethos of experimentation.  Who doesn't love experimentation?  That
> should worry us.
>
> This totally fits with Felan's art worlds model but the next step is to
> articulate how the actual practice of experimental gameplay supports (or
> not) existing and yet-to-exist mobilizations.  Obviously, experimental
> gameplay is a lovely rubric for indie self-fashioning and even relative
> economic success (and this is how the experimental gameplay workshops have
> evolved) but is there more too it than this?
>
> cheers,
> Bart
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> =================================================
> Bart Simon, Associate Professor of Sociology
> Director, Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG)
> Concordia University, Montreal
>
> bart.simon [at] concordia.cahttp://www.tag.hexagram.ca
> =================================================
>
>
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-- 
skot deeming
http://www.theghostarcade.tumblr.com
http://www.teamvector.tumblr.com
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