GAME CONTENTISM: A CURSE AND A DISEASE

Video game analysts - bloggers and scholars - are prone to a number of deplorable mistakes, but the two most frustrating are the assumed primacy of the immediate moment, and the assumed primacy of content. In a medium set apart by its access to mechanisation, process, automation, and convention, analysts chose to talk about the static content, the plot details, the immediate moment, and the cinekinematics. The contours of the state space are reduced to the visual, the plot, the text. The source code is invisible. Despite some scholars' best efforts, the computing machine and the software are still invisible. In a medium that fundamentally depends on software.

This is reinforced by the construction of games as a generic coathanger for fashionable items of content - a film in more than one dimension but nevertheless a film which can be traversed, reduced to a kind of phenomenological poetry, and thus transcended.

But if one looks at the experiences of others, a much different picture may emerge.   The source code, itself a social product, produces (in some specific cases) a social space. It does this through players, even the ones that just watch. It may also produce an object, just as other software constitutes objects of utility. The features of these electrical entities can only be found in their social context. No amount of phenomenological navel-gazing will put a scratch in the surface of the thing. Both the social and internal dynamics of software must be understood (at least in the abstract) to come to general conclusions. Specific conclusions are much easier to come by, but few seem to be willing to make them. In doing so, they create a feeble and constrained vision for the future of the medium. They place poetry above sport, composition above improvisation, the work above the practice.

I am not interested in video games, really. I am interested in software art and software culture. Where the word art is used in the most mundane and everyday sense of the word, the kind of art that one needs not aspire to because it's just there. Where culture is used in the broadest sense of the term - encompassing the entire gamut of related symbolic meaning. Video games are a significant part of this, but their customary name is hugely misleading - video certainly does not come first.