Of the blogs I’ve been following recently my current favorite is Versus Clu Clu Land, written by the mysteriously named Iroquois Pliskin (if you catch the reference you get a good idea of his taste in games). About a week ago Iroquois posted a short piece drawing an analogy between Jazz and video games.
Music has always seemed an appropriate metaphor for games to me, and I think the post does a good job of touching on the interesting design tension inherent between structure and improvisation. Unfortunately it gets caught up in the over-blown ‘narrative versus interactivity’ dichotomy at the end and doesn’t speak to what I think is the more interesting logical conclusion: that playing a game is a form of performance.
That’s more or less what I see as the conclusion, too–though I get to it through Homeric epic rather than jazz. It’s what’s led me to argue that games and stories are actually just two forms of performative play practice. Ian Bogost’s recent foray into speech act theory fits in well here, too.
Maybe we can keep this discussion rolling across the blogs that care. . .
While I agree that there is a performance quality to playing games (but certainly not a performance) — and that we can find similarities between game design and music composing (but also major differences) — I have an urge to ask: when will games be elevated to the level where critical discourse doesn’t spend the majority of its energy (or so it seems) comparing the form to other forms? The academic game world has a weak ego for sure, always over compensating to be taken seriously… and while I know there’s something to learn by making such comparisons, I suppose I just want games to be seen (and taken seriously) as games for awhile.
@CBerkeley I think the impression that games aren’t being taken seriously as games is actually a historical accident created by the hegemony of formalism in the 20th Century, when we all received our training. In current work on classical literature, the only exciting stuff is the stuff that compares e.g. tragedy to philosophy and philosophy to history. I’m hoping that game criticism may get to skip the pseudo-science of formalism all together, and get right to the good stuff.