Paolo, not sure what you mean by Newtonian
materialism? <br><br>I was wondering whether you could speak a bit about your portrayal of the videogame industry as "the dictatorship of entertainment." What is your sentiment on the industry, as well as indie gaming? And how do you see persuasive games fit in? <br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 6:35 PM, paolo - molleindustria <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:paolo@molleindustria.it" target="_blank">paolo@molleindustria.it</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<br>
A few messages ago, talking about an interdisciplinary collaboration
in game development, Renate Ferro mentions the clash of culture
between students from art school, tasked with the conceptualization
of new games, and engineering students, in charge of their technical
implementation:<br>
<pre>"Feedback from the gaming students provided insight that the
collaborative plans were too "difficult" to realize with their
relatively new programming skills. I rather doubt that now. The
artists gave up disappointed that their collaborative ideas and
conceptual drawings were for nothing."</pre>
<br>
I'd say that the project, from what I gather, was a recipe for
disaster from starters. Videogame development is an iterative
process that requires a certain familiarity with computation and
game design in general. Fresh perspectives from other fields should
be encouraged, but setting up a hierarchy of artists/ideators and
engineers/makers, especially when gender divide and different campus
cultures come into play, is a really bad idea. As permaculture
suggests, the most interesting things happen in the margins, where
different ecosystems collide and mingle. <br>
We should cultivate these liminal spaces in our institutions and in
society in general, but this has to involve a certain fluidity of
roles. Programmers need to be able solve the most peculiar "problem"
which is to create new and interesting problems. Artists need to get
their hands dirty with code and adopt a process that is as
user-centric as it is egocentric. <br>
<br>
I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that artist-driven designs were
actually extraordinarily difficult to implement. Media and
technological platforms are not infinitely malleable. They have
structural features that can make the resolution of certain problems
extremely easy, while seeming completely unfit for the resolution of
other kind of problems. Technologies have a history crystallized in
their DNA. The first computing machines were invented to calculate
trajectories of bombs and to assist the Nazi in identifying and
tracking Jewish people. It's not surprising that the descendant of
those IBM punch cards are apparatuses tracking and profiling
consumers while the history of computer games is mostly a history of
ballistic. Since SpaceWar!, bastard child of the Cold War's military
industrial complex, games have been privileging Newtonian
materialism, and worlds made of objects moving in space and clashing
with each other. <br>
From these early day of computing there has been an accumulation of
knowledge enhancing certain social functions of software like
predictive simulation, 3D immersion, long distance communication,
cataloging and sorting... all of which are driven by
military/industrial desires (although, obviously, can serve other
emerging purposes and are subject to hacking and hijacking).<br>
<br>
In a recent talk about procedural representations of sex in
videogames
(<a href="http://www.molleindustria.org/blog/fucking-polygons-fucking-pixels-on-procedural-representations-of-sex/" target="_blank">http://www.molleindustria.org/blog/fucking-polygons-fucking-pixels-on-procedural-representations-of-sex/</a>)
I hyperbolically claimed that we created technologies which make the
simulation of a grenade launcher way easier than a caress.<br>
It's not technological determinism, but rather the recognition that
a techno-cultural form like videogames, made by hardware, software,
protocols, formats, interfaces, algorithms but also tropes and
cultural expectations, may oppose a good deal of resistance when
derailed to an unusual direction.<br>
<br>
This is something I often experience. When working on Unmanned,
which not coincidentally thematizes some of these issues, I was
interested in complicating the obvious equivalence "drone warfare ==
videogames". I wanted to make a nuanced game about introspection,
verbal communication and existential dissonance. <br>
In all its awkwardness, I'm mostly satisfied by the result but I
felt frustrated and miserable during the whole development process.
I felt like I was trying to force feed the machine with a terribly
unmodular and qualitative material it couldn't digest. <br>
On the other hand, I had a lot of fun developing my latest game (to
be released soon), which is an ironic take on a top down shooter. I
was solving problems that have been solved many times before:
trajectories, movements in space, collisions and so on. Computers
and game frameworks evolved to deal with them.<br>
<br>
If you are a techno-essentialist, or a game-essentialist, you may be
tempted to surrender to the medium's destiny: there are certain
things games just don't do very well, and you would be better off
writing a book or singing a song. But that would be a rather
depressing view. Technologies are also shaped by their misuses.<br>
<br>
Paolo<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
</div>
<br>_______________________________________________<br>
empyre forum<br>
<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au">empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au</a><br>
<a href="http://www.subtle.net/empyre" target="_blank">http://www.subtle.net/empyre</a><br></blockquote></div><br>