The rising price of gas is quite the issue in the US these days. What to do?
Make it a game, of course.
Wired writes on hypermilers, people who compete in getting the most mileage:
Even with gas at four bucks a gallon, Yahya Fahimuddin enjoys filling his car. It’s a contest, a chance to see how many miles he can squeeze from every tank. He’s getting about 45 mpg these days and says you can, too.
He’s a hypermiler, one of a growing number of people going to often extreme lengths to get 40, 50, even 60 mpg or more. “It’s like a videogame,” he says. “Can I beat my new high score?”
As I read it, “game” here implies all the features in my game definition, but it can also be described as an attitude, a way of seeing the activity of driving the car as an opportunity for optimizing a strategy, with the optimization in itself being pleasurable.
I have been thinking about describing it in this possibly pretentious way:
Games are the poetry of action.
Meaning: In the same way that poetry has a focus on the qualities of language itself rather than on conveying meaning (Jakobson), games have a focus on the qualities of action itself rather than on what the action can achieve. Or put more simply: games are autotelic (performed for their own sake), like poetry is autotelic.
“In the same way that poetry has a focus on the qualities of language itself rather than on conveying meaning (Jakobson)”
I suppose you acknowledge the narrowness of this conception of poetry. R. Jakobson is dubbed at Wikipedia as a formalist. Does that surprise me? ;)
I know you are half-joking, but I am beginning to think that standard charges like “formalism”, “determinism”, “narrowness” and so on do not have any useful meaning, but are rather not-so-subtle ways of implying that “my discipline is better than yours” (or perhaps “my discipline is on top of yours” as discussed in the previous blog post).
Jakobson’s description of poetry is pretty good IMO – did you have a better one in mind?
I like this poetry of action, even though it paves the way for unnecessary invasions by literary types who could start applying concepts from their theories without thinking about them. Oops. Well, then there isn’t really a reason not to like your formulation.
I feel for your suspicion of certain terms, though here I feel like the accusation of narrowness is kind of valid. Poetry can do a lot of things, and restricting it to just one purpose seems unnecessarily limiting. In the same way there are games that I love for being just how you’re defining them (like Mario Galaxy), but there are others I like precisely because of the specific meanings that they invoke.
imho, the different isms have instrumental value as they allow the positing of different (epistemological) viewpoints in relation to each other, in order to find out what is left unseen from which point of view. (of course that could be done without those words, but we tend to rely on language to provide us with such little shorthands.) introducing a word like “better” into the conversation would be a constructive contribution if there was some sort of competition involved.
pls don’t get me wrong; games as poetry of action sounds like a definition that can spark very interesting arguments. it is the dismissal of consequences that caught my eye.
re: the alleged narrowness; if you strip the “meaning” from dada poetry, you’re left with quirky wordplay and outdated typographic tricks. does September 12th without “that which the action is intended to achieve” make any sense?
often it works to take computer game play as autotelic activity, but assuming that it would always be the case; taking the “autotelicness” as its defining characteristic; might leave interesting cases outside the scope. (cf. how “dada without meaning” leaves out the political discourse it was immersed in and makes hardly any sense)
Olli, I think we agree somewhat, but there is some assumption you are making that I am not following: where do you find “the dismissal of consequences”?
Jesper,
With consequences I refer to “what the action can achieve” in
“[…]focus on the qualities of action itself rather than on what the action can achieve”.
With dismissal I refer to that which can happen to one thing when one focuses on another.
Isn’t there a difference between “focus” and “dismissal”? I talked about focus?
unpacking a metaphor can be challenging, acknowledged. i’ll try anyway. ;)
when something is in focus, something else is out of focus. it’s easier to make observations about that which is in focus. depending on the focal length(?), the object out of focus might be so blurry one would not really be able to observe it at all. in case everything is equally in focus, one should probably look for another metaphor with more suitable descriptive abilities.
Well, as you are pointing out, focus means emphasis, but not dismissal.
Aren’t you working from a “there can only be one”-assumption; that there can only ever be one level or type of description of anything? This is your assumption, not mine.
i haven’t intended to advocate the “only one type” position. you write up there that “Games are[…]”. should i have read your original post as meaning “Apart from being many other things, games are also[…]”?
It is interesting – this is exactly the kind of discussion I find myself having at conferences, and it almost seems to be about basic grammar.
If I say that “cars are vehicles”, it does not in any way imply that cars do not have other properties such as having engines, seats, or that they are not embedded in a socio-political context etc..
Likewise, if I say “Games are the poetry of action”, there is nowhere any implication that this is the only thing to be said about games.
Why would you think otherwise?
i am not thinking otherwise. cars have infinite number of properties. for example, as the sun now begins its descent set toward sweden, all the cars i see have a sort of yellowy glow on them. ;)
i thought that in a world with an infinite amount of things to be said about games, the topic of this thread was the idea of viewing them as the poetry of action, including but not limited to the idea’s feasibility for furthering the cause of computer games research.
All right – I am afraid I cannot disagree with you no matter how hard I try :)
I always liked “poetry is organised violence against language” – Barthes
I can’t remember if ‘language’ is translated from ‘langue’ or ‘parole’ – presumably it is ‘langue’ (the rule system) rather than ‘parole’ (the actual communication).
If it is ‘langue’, then I suppose Barthes’ definition would only apply to ‘hacks’ and ‘cheats’, which, for some people, is the most ‘artful’ way of playing any game. There was that ‘ludology of the oppressed’ – Brazillian kids turning the controller round to have more of a challenge on an otherwise boring game, which is something similar. (I forget the researcher who brought that to our attention, but I’m sure you know).
If ‘parole’, then it is perhaps closer to ‘poetry of action’.
Oh yes, and of course ‘hypermiling’ is a kind of hack, I suppose.