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

[Felan Parker]

Those are astute observations, Emma! As I was writing that, in the back of my mind I was wondering whether seemingly "experimental" game design practices in contexts like game jams have formalized and narrowed (territorialized, in assemblagey terms) as they have proliferated. Has the "jam game" and the "game sketch" become a genre category, and an end in itself? 
Whereas for a professional designer and educator like yourself, these games are "first drafts" that act as stepping stones towards more developed work (similar to how the prototype games included in the thatgamecompany special edition collection are framed, or the free Source mod versions of critically-acclaimed commercial artgames like Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable), venues like Punk Arcade and Glorious Trainwrecks explicitly do not frame the works they feature as preliminary to more polished work - they present rough, "unfinished" games as an end in themselves (in the case of Punk Arcade, freely adopting the language of punk and DIY culture to legitimate this practice). Obviously I'm painting in broad strokes here, but again I think we're dealing with different (competing?) conceptions of experimental game design, supported and sustained by different social-material networks.
(Sorry to sidebar the fascinating "main" discussion for this week!)
Felan


> From: ewestecott at faculty.ocadu.ca
> To: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 15:34:19 +0000
> Subject: [-empyre-] The Playsthetics of Experimental Digital Games: Week 1 - Featured Guests and Questions (Felan Parker)
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 
> Hello all
> 
> I am happy to be in such fine company, thanks for the invitation Sandra. I am engaging the discussion prior to my official slot as a way to detoxify from a weekend at the beast that is SXSW and as a distraction from my grumpiness at not making GDC this year.
> 
> My current interest in experimentation in game making is invested in the expansion of expressive approaches to game making. At the moment this is more of a political position than a theoretical one but I am implicated in local community initiatives in Toronto that push towards a more open, inclusive and experimental context for new voices coming to game making.
> 
> I wanted to respond to Felan's point about game jams encouraging experimentation, for me this doesn't necessarily follow. It depends on the context of the jam and the expertise and approach of the team jamming. Having hosted a range of game jams in the past year for me they are more about effective constraints. As focal points jams are hugely generative of what I have increasingly been calling game sketches, yet, in and of themselves don't imply experimental approaches (speaking from an art and design university I have an interest in both process and play objects).
> 
> As someone hosting, nurturing and invested in this work I have concerns about the expectations I place on these game sketches, often they are neither interesting nor 'beautiful failures' but are important stepping stones for the emerging game maker. One of the things I have observed across much game making is how quickly the making of games stops being a play act in and of itself, the irony here does not escape me. 
> 
> I am fascinated that game culture is now mature enough to engage a questioning of form at its periphery, Twine is a powerful tool for the current generation of makers that, for me, is reminiscent of the plastic pleasures of html markup in the 90s. As a gateway to personal expression Twine remains more open that other free game-making tools but is still bound to a particular type of practice, fertile for a particular type of literacy. The maker's dialogue with her tools is one site of experimentation with games that I look forward to talking more about in the next weeks.
> 
> Best
> Emma
> 
> "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." -- Audre Lorde
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> Emma Westecott
> Assistant Professor, Game Design
> Digital Futures
> Director, game:play Lab (@gameplaylab)
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> > RE: Experimentation VS demonstration, it seems to me like rapid prototyping, game jams, and so on encourage an approach to game design that is experimental by necessity due to the constraints of the process (time especially, but also in terms of other resources). The games produced are unpolished, unfinished, and while in some cases developers will go on to polish and finish them, there is certainly an audience for the rough, open-ended, maybe even risky aesthetic of these games (see, for example, the UCLA Game Lab's Punk Arcade, which was featured at Vector). This relates also to Bart's comment about failure - for every game design experiment that produces interesting results, there are several beautiful failures or glorious trainrecks that can be appreciated in those terms. (We might think about Flappy Bird here.)
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