Videogames are process

Or, making media for medium noticers

Process Is Art

There is a pleasure in process. The painter paints, and they experience a profound learning, a deep feeling. The consumer has no access to this through the painting, unless they are a very good painter themselves, and conversely the painter probably doesn’t see the painting in at all the same way as the consumer, because of all the extra context they have.

Processes can have qualities. Working with clay gives you a big wet thing that looks like a thing. You have to fire it if you want it to function or last. Working with a guitar produces sounds. You can play to an audience, and have them appreciate the sounds in a way that you can’t exactly do with clay… folks can appreciate watching the process, it is fascinating, but without the fire you don’t have ware. You can record music. A polaroid camera prints a single, perfect, image. Careful! Don’t shake it too much… or too little?

The pleasure in process can have qualities. Working with rough unrefined clay, or old paints, or just unfamiliar tools or materials sometimes, changes the pleasure of the process. When you find that good process that is both soft and malleable but also constrained enough that it almost guides your hand, like the grain of wood guides the carpenter, that is good! It feels right! Processes can feel better or worse.

A process is art, if nature is art. That is to say, you can learn about the world by working your clay, or playing your guitar, even if you never “publish” a work. A process can kick you. There are metaphors and meanings and abstractions in there, naturally occurring non-GMO, just as there are in cherry blossoms and rivers. I mean, just for example, we’re all here talking about a concept from a book on architecture. We aren’t architects. In the process of doing architecture Alexander discovered something so true about his world that it can inspire people today working in a medium that barely existed at the time! On the same note, a process is a performance, which is art: folks can watch you work clay, or play music. Even watching someone write can be powerful!

A videogame is a process someone made for you.

Going Out on a Limb

Maybe! I say Maybe! Maybe the way to make games that feel more alive… is to stop worrying too much about “games as art” and how a player might interpret the game, and think more about “games as process” and what a player might do with the game.

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Form and Content

The history of videogames has left us with lots of blazing hot electric guitars that have little cuckoo-clock spring loaded paintings inside, so after you finally 100% that sick chord progression you get to interpret a painting. Many of the games we grew up with, the games we have played, tried their best to separate form and content because they wanted to be understood that way, as form (first) and content. Chronologically, Videogames wanted to be games first. Maybe “cut” scenes and dialog “boxes” were just the wrong way to work our inspirations, our passions, our stories, and our real world obsessions into our art, our videogames.

And this history has left us, I think, always stumbling over and kind of endlessly re-dividing form and content. That is, after all, the shape of the thing we see before us. Like the sun, endlessly orbiting the earth.

many games take concentration when your playing, preventing you from playing this metagame at the same time. but you can reflect afterwards on your experience. or some games are pokey enough where you can reflect while playing

– Jack, discord

I don’t think it is necessary to separate these two things. I think it is preferable if they are deeply intertwined. Think about the way you read a challenging book. The pleasure of the words on the page, like a thousand little paintings, modular, serial, and the whole we build up little by little with every passing moment, are one. The more they are the better! Think about the way you read an easy book full of dialog boxes and cut scenes:

“Will you be?” I asked, suddenly anxious. “Will you really be here?”

“As long as you want me,” he assured me.

“I’ll always want you,” I warned him. “Forever.”

Stephenie Meyer, Twilight

_{(nothing inherently wrong with dialog, or dialog boxes, or cut scenes, they all have their place! It’s about how we use them)}

I think, in addition to the historical problem of cuckoo-clock electric guitars, we have the additional, consequent, problem of literacy. How can people learn to play videogames with the same attention they view paintings in a gallery if there just aren’t a lot of cases to work from?

I think we players don’t know how to play a videogame the way we view a painting because we haven’t been given enough good examples, education, time, etc… It is easier to make, separately, a good game that is juicy and fun to play, and some nice paintings, and then “cut” the paintings into “boxes” and pepper them into the game (it parallelizes really nicely too, perfect for… industry?). Once you have games like that, how would you learn to appreciate them as a whole. You might put the controller down to watch the cut-scene, or skip-skip-skip through the dialog. Or you might watch a let’s play! There is often nothing inherently in there asking you to appreciate the whole as a whole.

Two bullet points emerge:

1. Videogames could do to be a less clearly divisible into form and content.
2. We could do to play videogames as actively/presently as we view paintings in an art gallery.