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

Fri Mar 7 02:09:01 EST 2014

Barad is definitely an influence on my thinking! Her discussions of experiments as phenomena might be a way in to Bart's scientific analogy:
“experimenting and theorizing are dynamic practices that play a constitutive role in the production of objects and subjects and matter and meaning.” (Meeting the Universe Halfway, 56)
So, in addition to the design and play of "these games," how we talk about them and theorize them is part of the materializing process. Going back to Sandra's initial statement, "radical honesty" in games might be found in any of these practices. Here's some examples of each from my perspective...
At the level of design, experimentation could be kind of honesty when it does not take anything for granted and allows us to "play to see what happens." I'm a huge fan of tabletop roleplaying games - games like D&D, yes, but also a whole range of "indie" RPGs and "story-games" that are much closer to what we see in contemporary indie and DIY games. Many of these games operate in familiar genres (fantasy, sci-fi, etc.) but refine the rule systems into more streamlined and open-ended forms of collaborative storytelling. Others, though, engage more directly with the kinds of themes we associate with "experimental" media. Avery Alder Mcdaldno's The Quiet Year gives players a framework for telling the story of a "post-collapse" community in a year of relative peace and quiet. Players contribute different elements to the setting and story, drawing a map on paper as they go. The mechanics allow players to experiment, push, and pull as they (only ever temporarily) take on different interest groups or individuals within the community, but always return to a more "macro" view to consider the wider impications of these moments (http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-year/).
At the level of play and discourse, I'm thinking of a certain mode of essayistic game criticism that focuses "honestly" on the embodied experience of the player messily entangled with the game, rather than treating the game as an external object - Brendan Keogh's "Across Bodies and Worlds" discusses this(http://gamescriticism.org/articles/keogh-1-1). Mattie Brice's "Pokemon Unchained" was an experiment in player-imposed rules (which I call expansive gameplay) that transformed an ordinary game of Pokemon into a bizarre, dark allegory for slavery and racism (http://pokemonunchained.tumblr.com/tagged/PU/chrono). porpentine and Merritt Kopas' "SUPER SEXAGON" is another great example that derives from deeply embodied accounts of play a manifesto for "radical play" (http://web.archive.org/web/20130608033019/http://trashbabes.com/porp/play/supersexagon.html - looks like the original link is down, sadly):
"we can play to seek out new knowledge and experiences. We can use play as a tool to learn about our world, other people, and our bodies and selves. And we can play together as a means of strengthening our connections with each of these.
[...]
The goal isn’t to replace one corrupted form of play with some recovered, true one. Instead: exploration, acknowledgment of difference. Explosion of the lie that there are right/wrong ways to touch, to fuck, to create, to play."
Playing and writing in this mode is always experimental because it is built "ground-up" from the material-discursive phenomena of playing games, rather than based on "top-down" concepts and commitments, and this is a kind of honesty as well.
Felan
> From: s.danilovic at mail.utoronto.ca
> To: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2014 18:40:49 +0000
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] The Playsthetics of Experimental Digital Games: Week 1 Featured Guests and Questions
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear All, 
> 
> Skot, Bart and Felan, this conversation has launched quite beautifully and your thoughts and ideas really resonate with me! I have some initial reflections, and then, will add more at a later time. A reminder to empyre members and all invited guests to wade into the conversation, if you wish! 
> 
> My original intention in naming this topic  "the playsthetics of experimental games" was to provide a springboard from which we can flexibly play with those labels, categories, concepts, words, tropes, assumptions, biases, conflations (I riff on Mary Flanagan's ideas here in Critical Play: Radical Game Design); but also consider the variety of contexts, publics, and communities that intersect in this regard. Games as "interventions" are important in this discussion on experimentation, due to the socially meaningful ways in which they "make a difference" (I reference last year's discussion of the Games of the Oppressed and Gonzalo Frasca's work in this regard). THIS is really important to me (again, this is my own bias that instrumentalizes games from this point of 'mattering', how games  'matter' to a variety of actors, which would be riffing on Karen Barad's work). The Baradian perspective may click in some ways with Felan's idea of assemblages… and games as phenomena and material-discursive apparatuses instead of mere artifacts or objects. 
> 
> 
> So, experimental games as game experiences that speak to us in ways unaccustomed to is important (my interpretation of Bart's 'otherwise being'). It is not impossible, I think, to see 'mainstream' games offering points of departure in relation to 'experimentation', perhaps for strategic purposes, for purposes of slyly using the label 'indie', 'experimental' etc to market the game. I didn't want to exclude  Triple-A games from this conversation, but…I was hoping to privilege the non-mainstream (whatever that means) as a way to honour and celebrate gamemakers, games, communities, that are doing really interesting and in my opinion, courageous work. I would hate to reify in any regard, but... language, language! 
> 
>  Drawing and redrawing these lines is half the fun. 
> 
> 
> 
> Skot, I think your statement below strikes me as really significant to this conversation and I would wholeheartedly agree that semantics add an additional challenge in this regard:
> 
>  "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".
> 
> We have a variety of 'practitioners' on the invited guest list this month, they will speak to this idea of how praxis converges and diverges from our theoretical and discursive speculations. 
> 
> So, if semantics are an issue, then, how do we talk about "these" games? I think talking in flawed ways is more important than not talking at all (as a friend of mine would argue). 
> 
> But also, I like Bart's  "games as experiments" reconceptualization and the idea of failure, which made me think of Jack Halberstam's "Queer Art of Failure" (2011), the commitment to "alternative forms of knowledge production" , which basically deploys an intervention into the binary of success and failure. The scientific analogy that Bart alludes to is really interesting…I wonder where and how we can take this concept further?  
> 
> More later! 
> 
> Cheers,
> Sandra 
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> ________________________________________
> From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of skot deeming (mrghosty) <mrghosty at gmail.com>
> Sent: March 5, 2014 11:14 AM
> To: soft_skinned_space
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] The Playsthetics of Experimental Digital Games: Week 1 Featured Guests and Questions
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
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