Making meaning

These are topics that are quite interesting to me! So I’m happy to jump in.
Some answering is due: 

I like what droqen stated about a game failing to express itself correctly and making you rage quit out of confusion or just blaming the game for your own mistakes. And then Jack asks himself: 

What is success for the poem? Discovering author’s intent?”

Jack in Designing without correctness

I think success should be “getting to its end”. In non-infinite games, I’ve always felt you “succeed” when you finish it and see the credits roll. ^{_{(Since we’re in a translations convo, in Spanish we say “darlo vuelta” = “turn it all around”, referring to the fact that after the credits you get back to the first “press start” screen; you go full circle on the game back to the beginning)}}. For a big part of my life I’ve felt that finishing a book meant succeeding at it, it felt like if I was winning something everytime I’d finish a big novel. So I guess a book (or even a poem!) that is so obtuse or boring or whatever that makes you quit, would be a text that fails its purpose. 

But, you know, I now agree a lot with Jack and all that Barthes’ theory. I decided at some point that I could abandon a book halfway through and still “check it” in my imaginary list of things I wanted to read. And that experience sufficed. I tried it, know what it is about and how it feels, and my experience is valid. 

On the other hand, my opinion on art critiques is complicated (perhaps because I always hated them and ended up becoming one!). Nobody should tell you how to feel about a piece! But the historical/social context is interesting, as well as deeper readings. I also rolled my eyes on a few parts of the Road Not Taken essay, but it also had a few quotes that left me a lot more than the poem itself. (Namely: ”Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions.” (emphasis mine))

And I think this goes well with droq’s topic:
Translations!

An author might be dead, but a language is not. You might not care what the author tries to say, but the language itself speaks as well, with its nuances and own history. We wrote a couple of things together with Droq for Argentinian publications and I found myself struggling to translate my own English-thought words into my native tongue: that’s how strong nuances are. That’s why your translator’s native interpretation says a lot more than what you can get from a translation (or worse: a translation from a translation; like photocopies that resemble less and less the original on each iteration). 

I loved what Ziggy said, and I don’t want it to get lost in our chat, so I’m gonna quote: 

It’s really just a simple, indisputable, fact: the meaning of a message is in the receiver. If you broadcast a poem into space and an alien race picks it up and nothing else… There is zero chance they will interpret it correctly. The meaning just isn’t there. The work, the message, is a set of instructions for a meaning making machine. (…) Before the death of the author everyone was implicitly claiming that “the text is dead”, right? The text has one interpretation, one intended reading, and this will never change or grow. So maybe we should instead defend “the life of the text” rather than assault the author lol”. 

Ziggy in our chat

This reminded me to China Miéville’s alien language in Embassytown, and also to that joke anthropologists found recently, that, of course, makes no sense to us. I like “the life of the text” because it connects with the life of a language. Languages change and those instructions stop being clear. And at some point, a language dies, and so those texts. 

Rami Ismail talks in A Profound Waste Of Time about how videogames are a language, and how smaller communities taught themselves to “speak videogame” and created their own dialects. And so I wonder, will one day come in which dialects are so far apart than we struggle to understand a game from a very different culture? Or that the language changes so much we don’t remember how to read. Not talking about the text, but about the mechanics. The assumptions, like “red is health and blue is magic”. Have any of you encountered so far a game that is just so obscure that you had to forget your misconceptions and learn how to speak it?

I’m eager to learn new ways of speak game.

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P.S: Every time I tried to write ‘text’ or ‘book’, I’d write ‘game’ instead, and then correct myself. Makes you wonder…