Download August 27 – What are games, pt. I: Galloway`s Gamic Actions .

Recounting past perspectives on Play
The preceding analysis permits play to be defined as an activity which is essentially:
1. Free: in which playing is not obligatory; If it were, it would at once lose its
attractive and Joyous quality as diversion;
2. Separate: circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and freed in
advance;
3. Uncertain: the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained
beforehand, and some latitude for innovations being left to the player's
initiative;
4. Unproductive: creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements or any
kind, and, except for the exchange of property among the players, ending In a
situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game;
5. Governed by rules: under conventions that suspend ordinary laws, and for the
moment establish new legislation, which alone counts;
6. Make-believe: accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality or of a
free unreality, as against real life.
-- Johan Huizinga (1938), as modified by Roger Caillois (1959)
Narrative camps, Ludic camps and a short lived battle (only) within the academy
Gaming and storytelling have always
overlapped…
there is no reason to limit the resulting
form to the dichotomies between story
and game…
Games are not ‘textual’ or at least not
primarily textual: where is the text in
chess? …a central “text” does not
exist—merely a context.
Any game consists of three aspects:
we can think instead in matters of
degree. A story has greater emphasis
on plot; a game has greater emphasis
on the actions of the player.
--Janet Murray (2004)
“From Game-Story to Cyber Drama”
(1) rules,
(2) a material/semiotic system (a gameworld), and
(3) gameplay (the events resulting from application of the rules to
the gameworld).
--Espen Aarseth (2004)
“Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation”
On Galloway: what is the video game?
Video Games come into being when the machine is powered up and the
software is executed; they exist when enacted.
…
An active medium is one whose very materiality moves and restructures
itself—pixels turning on and off, bits shifting in hardware registers, disks
spinning up and spinning down… I avoid the word “interactive” and
prefer instead to call the video game, like the computer, an actionbased medium (Galloway 2-3).
~
One may start by distinguishing two basic types of action in video
games: machine actions [Those performed by the software and hardware
of the game] and operator actions [those performed by the player].
…
Of course, the division is completely artificial—both machine and
operator work together in a cybernetic relationship to effect the various
actions of the video game in its entirety (5).
Overview of Operator  Machine Interaction
Arsenault & Perron, “In the Frame of the Magic Circle”. 120-121.
To play a video game is to participate in a continuous feedback loop:
In order for (player driven) progress to occur within a game, the player
Must enact, and the machine, as it is programmed, must respond.
However, within the context of the game, there are actions that occur
Outside the scope of the narrative world and/or beyond the control
Of the player.
Gamic Action in Four Movements:
Diegetic
Move,
Expressive
Ambience,
Transition
Operator
Machine
Pause,
Configure,
Cheat
Enabling,
Disabling
Nondiegetic
Mechanical
Embodiments
A Black Box is a system
that can be viewed in
terms of its input and
output.
The inner workings of a
Black Box are hidden from
the user and, in some cases,
unknowable.
Group Activity
•
•
•
•
In groups of 4 or 5, select a game;
Assign each member one of the four movements;
Machine/Diegetic, Machine/Non-Diegetic, Operator/Diegetic, Operator/Non-Deigetic.
Play the game for five minutes, with each member focusing on a movement while documenting
and describing (in rough terms) instances of this movement in the game play;
As a group, consider what aspects of the game experience have been black boxed from you, what
is happening that you are not seeing, and what evidence do you have that it is happening.