meaning, for a moment

what is a game if not a means to an end?

• in Half-Real, Jesper Juul explores the nature of games as a medium caught between “real rules and fictional worlds”.
• in Across Worlds and Bodies, Brendan Keogh suggests that games criticism and analysis ought to move past determining which elements of a game are and are not the game and instead focus on the “phenomenological pleasures of videogame play through [game-and-player] cyborg bodies”.
• in Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai describes the impacts of art through the lens of affects–emotional states making actions, transformations, and other emotional states more or less possible.

these three works describe a line which moves from form to effect, escaping from a world in which rules are “half” of games — into one where a game has rules but is not defined by them in any exclusive sense — to finally a book which is not about games at all but discusses tone supported and conveyed by the material of the thing without submitting to that material for its own sake.

i feel ready to transcend form.

~

why define or rely on definitions of games or play in the first place?

i read Across Worlds and Bodies at Zeigfreid’s suggestion, in response to my expressing some negative feelings about the games criticism that i had read.

after reading: i suppose that i believe Keogh doesn’t go far enough, ultimately falling back into the formal argumentation he argues against — moving the focus from the meaninglessly material (“a pre-determined and arbitrary notion of ‘gameness’”) only to fall victim to an even deeper well of still-material clutter (“semiotics, actions, and systems . . . controllers, screens, rumble motors . . . characters, a projected world, music, menus”)

~

we’ve taken two steps forward–what if we now take three steps back?

rather than playing well, what is wellness itself, and how might we pursue it?

rather than LIVING games, what is aliveness itself, freed from form?

rather than HAIKU games, what is haikuness?

~

jack: in your recent letter, focusing on game-plays, you wrote

“I want to get back to my point of there being something else beyond playing well. That playing well allows you to access. . . . It is a latent, deep feeling of ALIVENESS . . .”

i’d like to catch you in this moment — before you returned to that world of material, of invitations to play, of boundaries, of space.

in some way i regret moving the conversation from HAIKU games to LIVING games — i drew a line through one ‘games’ topic to another ‘games’ topic, instead of moving past the gameness of games at all.

what is it that we want our games to do to each other?

what does it mean?