Koster’s argument is that a narrative can serve a game’s feedback function, but only, basically, once. His conclusion is that narratives are not a very good — not a very sustainable — game mechanic. I agree with him, mostly. I’ve written previously about how narratives and games are a bit like oil and water in several respects. (But I’m broadening my views more recently.)

And, though the Koster post makes sense as written, it’s based on a very simple model of both games and narratives.

Koster’s narrative model is focused on the sequencing of events.

And his game model is a concoction of stimulus-response mechanisms and pattern-matching. This model presents itself as more about the pattern-matching than the stimulus-response mechanisms, but we know it’s all the same because there is no clear indication in the model as to why pattern-matching is fun: pattern-matching is fun, this model says, because it is — and “fun is the process of discovering areas in a possibility space” (from Theory of Fun).

This is unsatisfying in that pattern-matching is not universally fun. Certainly, some pattern-matching is more fun than some other. And, in fact, some pattern-matching is no fun at all. Pattern-matching folk like Koster admit this, but what they admit about it is this: Some patterns are too difficult to match, and others are too easy; those patterns are no fun. The patterns that are the most fun to match are the ones in the middle of being too difficult and too easy.

That makes sense, as far as it goes. Indeed, the patterns that are most fun to match are sort of like Goldilock’s bed: a bed with dimensions and complexities similar to the dimensions and complexities of Goldilocks. So, likewise, the patterns that are the most fun to match are those patterns with dimensions and complexities most similar to the dimensions and complexities of pattern-matchers. But there’s a problem: the patterns that are really the most fun to match are not simply those patterns with dimensions and complexities most similar to the dimensions and complexities of pattern-matchers, but patterns with dimensions and complexities most similar to the dimensions and complexities of the human condition of pattern-matchers. So, while these sorts of patterns might qualify as patterns, they also qualify as something else: beauty and art.

Stimulus-response and pattern-matching models don’t say too much about these special sorts of patterns: the beauty and art sort. Or, when they do say something, they say something like this: games can’t deliver these sort of patterns. Koster says something like this: “[G]ame systems,” he says, “have a very limited emotional palette.”

Some people — some of the same ones — would then further say that games are inferior to those things that can deliver the beauty and art sort of patterns: things like films, novels, and narratives. (Roger Ebert, for instance, has said something very similar to this.)

And then there are some other people entirely — Marie-Laure Ryan in Avatars of Story, for instance — who say that both narratives and games can deliver beauty and art. Games and narratives may even be able to deliver these sorts of patterns simultaneously and together — a claim based on a very different model of games and narratives than is Koster’s claim. In Ryan’s view, narrative is less critically about the sequencing of events than it is about the construction of a narrative world, including both world building and world manipulation (cf Herman’s Basic Elements of Narrative).

All told, this is a more engaging claim than is Koster’s in that if a narrative provides feedback in a game through world building and world manipulation, then you no longer have to worry about the diminishing feedback of a repetitive narrative sequence, you can start to benefit from the more interesting and compounding feedback of a recursive narrative function.

Unfortunately, because this realization is really a very good one, it has led many narratologists, including Ryan, astray. Because narrative (or, more circumspectly, narrativity) can be a game mechanic, say the narratologists, game and narrative are compatible. They are sympatico.

But no. They are not.

Luke Skywalker, in the very first of the Star Wars movies, demonstrates his fledgling mastery of the Force by parrying attacks while blinded.

Neo, in the culmination of the Matrix trilogy, negotiates his way into the Machine City while blind; without eyes, Neo sees what others cannot.

These are fictional characters and fictional accomplishments, but each is similar in representing human vision as a useful but optional component of human experience. Should our sight be deprived, these stories tell us, there is recourse. Our other senses — physical, mental, or ‘spiritual’– step up.

There is much fairy tale in this claim, of course. But this fairy tale is seductive and used in subtle ways to support a politically appealing view of human experience as an egalitarian feature of our species, equally available to all regardless of our physical differences.

In practice and fact, however, human blindness confers human disability and limitation.

Can a blind player be a pinball wizard? No.

But what about a more general question: Can a blind player play a game?

Certainly. Blind players are prevented from interacting with game tokens in the same fashion as fully visioned players, but, at least in traditional games, it is the relationship among game tokens — which token is ahead, which is behind; which is valuable, which is not — that constitutes the game. And accessing and manipulating this relationship among game tokens is an act of cognition, not vision.

In fact, there is a variant of chess — blindfold chess — built on this realization.

It must be noted, however, that in order to perform well at blindfold chess, it is much more important to be skilled at chess than to be skilled at blindness. Blind chess-players seem to have no particular advantage in playing blindfold chess; chess grandmasters, on the other hand, have a great advantage in playing blindfold chess.

And chess is not the only sort of game. For interactive digital games — first-person shooters, for instance — the relationship between game tokens is not the only variable defining the game. To access and manipulate relationships among game tokens, the digital game player must access and manipulate the game interface, which is then equally defining of game form and experience.

Most digital games depend on a visual and tactile interface; some games (e. g., Milton Bradley’s Simon) also depend on an audible interface. But for interactive digital games, to remove the ability to access and manipulate the game interface is much more crippling than to remove the sight of a chessboard.

Certainly a blind player can play chess. But can a blind player play Team Fortress 3?

And then there are a couple of further questions:

1. The possibilities of game design. Can Team Fortress 3 — and similarly real-time, interactive digital games — be translated into a medium that a blind player can play? For instance, the rules of golf have been modified to accommodate blind golfers, but to what extent do these modifications recreate the play of golf? For games like golf (and even more so for first-person shooters), it’s not clear that a blind player can access and manipulate the same play experience as the sighted player. But can games be designed in some alternative way — not to mimic but to evoke experience? For instance, perhaps this might be possible through synesthesia: the subjective interpretation of sensory data in terms of an alternative sensory process, e. g. “hearing” colors or “seeing” sounds.

2. The realities of human design. To what extent does human experience in general — play or otherwise — depend on the human senses? Obviously, human experience depends a great deal on the senses, but we tend to evaluate this dependency as a binary one: either the experience is accessible (in which case it is the same egalitarian experience for all) or it is accessible to some and wholly inaccessible to others (e. g., the blind).

Playing the audio — beeping sounds — version of Simon and playing the visual — blinking lights — version of Simon are normally considered, essentially, playing the same game. If so, then a blind player can be considered to be playing the same memory game of Simon ( i. e., having the same experience) as a deaf player. However, playing the conventional, graphically animated version of World of Warcraft and playing a text-only, MUD-like version of World of Warcraft seem (particularly during the combat portions of the game) very different experiences.

When and how does this difference occur?

If we play World of Warcraft in black-and-white, is it still the same game-playing experience? If we play the game with cataract-impaired vision, is it still the same experience? If we play the game with inferior hand-eye coordination, is it still the same experience? During which portion of turning off the sound and the light and the touch of an interactive digital game is that game rendered into a different experience? Is it during some single critical moment or is it during every moment?

Our most fundamental and universal human experience — our sense of self — suffers from gentle degradations. In between human life and human death are subtleties, sometimes caused by the impairment of our senses, sometimes caused by their augmentation. If we accept this of the human experience of self, why shouldn’t we also accept it of the human experience of play?

The play of a skilled player with superior senses and faculties is not merely quantitatively different from that of an unskilled player in hours played, levels cleared, and scores achieved. It is a qualitatively different experience.

We might even say, politically unappealing though it may be, that the play of a skilled player is a more complete experience.

***

Here’s how I feel about planes. Don’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t fall.

Otherwise the view is fine, except when there are clouds which are not light and not fluffy and not shaped like anything whatsoever.

Also, it’s good they have those sliding things that block the windows because otherwise the view is either way too bright or overly depressing except for when there aren’t any clouds and you are low enough to look straight down and see things.

Why don’t they have a camera in the nose of the plane? A pointable camera, with a joystick that allows you to point it, natch. Then you could zoom and pan without having to look over the person sitting next to the window and make sure your shoulders don’t touch.

They have Modern Family, after all. And they have games. And sometimes they have Internet service, but I think you still have to pay by sliding your card through one of those things like the ones they use in European restaurants.

I do think it’s a good idea to make you pay in whole numbers though. Change is a bad thing in an airplane because you have to slide around and twist to get your hand in your pocket. And sometimes if you bang the bottom part of your thumb just right it makes you unclench your fist and the change drops and then what.

Have you ever had to look for a dropped contact lens on an airplane? It’s like you have to clear out three rows and there’s always someone sleeping under a blanket. A contact lens can get caught on one of those fuzzy blankets and get carried off the plane.

I usually take the blankets with me, by the way.

I like those back-of-the-seat elastic compartments because you can push your trash way down to the bottom and then nobody knows it’s there when they ask you to put your trash in the plastic bag, which they do way too early since they have to do it like six times including when everyone is supposed to be buckled in.

Do you leave your seatbelt loosely buckled in case of turbulence like the pilots in the cockpit do?

I don’t.

Do you believe that cops give you a ticket now for not wearing a seatbelt in your own car? It’s an authoritarian country basically.

I never tilt my seat back. It’s not like it goes very far anyway, like two inches or something. But you can seriously wreck somebody’s knees in those two inches. It’s a privilege I’m not willing to take and I frown upon those who do, but they never see because of course they are not looking.

WHACK! Right into the knees.

If I get a good seat, I’m usually happy. It is so good to be waiting, sitting on the carpeted terminal floor with a zillion other people, with every single plug-in taken, and you can maybe get a bathroom stall only after standing in an awkward line with your little rollaway thing, and then you do the little miniature zigzag that allows you to get inside the little stall, and you shut the door and you lock the door just to get away from all the people, and then you get on the plane and you are like so lucky to have an aisle seat with nobody in the middle.

You have an aisle seat with nobody in the middle!

And there’s some person at the window who is propped up on an elbow at the window and looking the other way with no bags and your bag can go in the middle and your legs can stretch out and even stretch further into the aisle because it looks like nobody else is coming down the aisle.

It is all so good.

Like the nightmare of all time would then be if right before the doors close this huge fat guy in a tank top with upper-arm shoulder hair sort of like that sidekick guy in My Name is Earl but much much bigger comes in with two big shopping bags like from Macy’s or Ikea or something and gives that little grin and nod that means would you unstretch your legs please and let my hugeass thighs bump through your knees to my middle seat which I bought with some kind of groupon offer so that I can auction cars in New Jersey and oh is this your bag where my flipflop feet would otherwise go and oh I forgot to put my bags in the overhead so the stewardess can take them after they pass right by your nose and oh I got lunch in there which is something like a melted cheese something sandwich in a see-through plastic container with a plastic fork and a salt packet from some godawful place like Hardee’s.

Live that nightmare once or twice.

I drink ginger ale. Every single time. I don’t drink ginger ale anywhere else, but on a plane that’s what I do.

• If University of California Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi claims that ordering UCD campus police to clear tents from the UCD campus was justified in order to assure the health and safety of students, why has she since allowed the tents to remain?  How have health and safety issues been addressed?

• Why does the Occupy Wall Street movement insist on staying at a single location?  Aren’t protesters more mobile than the massive police forces gathered to oust them?  Why shouldn’t the protesters, at the last moment, move a couple of blocks away?

• In discussions concerning the American college football championship, what is the basis for the popularly held argument that a playoff format is impractical because of the money invested in the current bowl system?  Since student-athletes receive none of that money, and since other NCAA sports (basketball, baseball, and such) have play-off systems currently in place, what’s the deal?  Why isn’t the NCAA involved in the discussion on the part of the student-athletes?

• When the products of nonprofit businesses are used to gain a competitive marketplace advantage by for-profit corporations, aren’t the for-profit corporations profiting from the tax-exempt status of the nonprofits?

• Isn’t ‘sociability’ just as highly (if not more) correlated with financial success as ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurship’?  ‘Sociability’ can be labeled either ‘non-cognitive skills‘ or, more pejoratively, ‘cronyism.’  If so, then how do we teach sociability?  Is sociability being taught in the newly minted Institutes of Innovation and Entrepreneurship?

King Lear

Joe Paterno, we are told, loves the classics.  Yet his story seems closer to the tragedy of Shakespeare than the ancients.

Ancient Greek tragedy revealed the inevitable consequence of divine power pitted against the rule of man.  In contrast, like Shakespeare’s Lear and Richard, Joe Paterno suffered no intervention from the deities; he had no compass to follow but his own.  But the Joe Paterno saga then falls short of Shakespearean drama in that it lacks a well-formed antagonist.  There is no Lady Macbeth to seduce and delude Joe Paterno, no usurper to kill his father and marry his mother.  The sloppily written Jerry Sandusky character, a buffoonish jester within Paterno’s kingly court, is inadequate for the role.

Perhaps, to better understand Joe Paterno, we need to recast his villain.

And, if so, then what are the similarities between JoePa’s tragedy and that of Lt. John Pike, the pepper-spraying policeman?  And what do Lt. Pike and ill-fated UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi have in common?  How might we cast a villain so that it equally causes the failures of GOP candidate Rick Perry and imperious New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg?  Bernie Madoff and Michael Vick?  Disastrous FEMA Director Michael Brown and convicted felon Martha Stewart?

In its favor, we might recast this villain as “the fellowship of a community.”  In its criticism, we might call it “the nepotism of a tribe.”

Rather than a divine power dramatically intervening, this villainous antagonist is more subtle and mundane:  a biological property of our social species.  Yet, no less than Sphinx or Minotaur, the villain of group pressure, power, and privilege proves fatal.

Social characteristics vital to the survival of our species — dedication, friendship, loyalty, and trust — simultaneously promote a sense of belonging and a self-serving sense of righteousness.   The preservation of social community, a tribe — including tribal values and beliefs — is then judge and jury of individual behavior.

Joe Paterno the individual, student of the classics, is pitted against Joe Paterno the leader, supporter of Penn State.

The individual succumbs.  A tragedy results.

What sort of weight did Joe Paterno assign Sandusky’s behavior — even suspected behavior — in relation to the value he assigned his community:  what Penn State had accomplished and what it might accomplish further?  When Lt. John Pike chose to pepper-spray UCD students, surely the lieutenant did not make his decision as an individual, isolated from the fellowship of his kind; nor did Pike’s comrade-in-arms, Police Chief Annette Spicuzza, ever pause or waver in her support of their common bond.  When Chancellor Katehi ordered forth her campus police, surely she did not do so as an individual but as an appointed representative of the University of California system, in the companionship of her fellows, in the same spirit that she has received “full trust and confidence” from University of California President Mark Yudof — and, we can imagine, in the same spirit of mutual benediction that resulted in the committee construction of this:

The politicizing of universities – and in particular, of students – represents participation in the political process that exceeds the bounds of logic.  This contributes to the rapid deterioration of tertiary education.

As the natural history of our species demonstrates, one good politicization deserves another.  To combat the threat of individualism, we construct a police state worthy of the task.  And to thwart the evils of an opposing tribe — whether political party or religious order or football team — we register to vote and take rites and hire powerful coaches of our own, to strike most effectively against those who think and behave differently, to protect and reward those who think and behave similarly.

I am certain that our politicians know this, for our politicians most suffer through the disillusionment of individualism.  The current US Secretary of State, for instance, must realize how slippery are the vagaries of personal love and honor, how comforting are the certainties of group debts and obligations.

But then we are told:  “It takes a village to raise a child.”

Joe Paterno, Hillary Clinton, and the grizzled veterans of our contemporary tragedy know better:  It takes a village to raise a despot.

But this seems like hard work.

If markets know best, why should police do hard work?  Maybe markets can do it for them.

Instead of using surreptitious GPS trackers and ubiquitous security cameras and old-fashioned stakeouts (do police still do this?), why not find out what the bad guys are doing before the bad guys do it?

Maybe police can do what Tom Cruise did in Minority Report:  predict criminal behavior.

Market-driven research can help.

Two brief scenarios:

• New Orleans’ own Federated Sampling recently received $2.8M in funding.  DARPA should kick in.  Federated Sampling  and other firms now specialize in insuring “respondents are who they say they are” through “real-time validation from public records.”  This technology seems to function like a lie-detector test.  Police could certainly use this.
• And then, once we know who everybody is, Nic Ducheneaut tells us (via Michael Mateas) that “games could predict personality types by observing and recording in-game behavior.”  This could be useful too.  If in-game behavior can be used to predict personality, then why can’t out-of-game behavior be used to predict personality?

I’m betting that predicting who is going to commit a crime is not that different from predicting who is going to buy a product.  There is synergy here.

If properly arranged blocks did not disappear from the Tetris screen, then perhaps Tetris would have no winning condition.  But they do disappear.

The winning condition in Tetris is to properly arrange falling blocks and cause them to disappear, thereby enabling a new game of Tetris.

These successive games of Tetris can be made easier or harder to win by manipulating a number of factors — most commonly the speed at which the Tetris blocks fall.  (And here, I should note, making a game so difficult to win that it is very unlikely to be won does not, of itself, preclude that game from having a winning condition.)

In analogy, a chess match of infinite chess games is not a game without a winning condition.  It is an arbitrary extension of the game of chess, wherein each game of chess has precisely the same winning condition as the ones before and after it.

In the case of Tetris, we can clearly see that this sort of extension is arbitrary by the common interposition of “levels” to restore the (most enjoyable) integrity of the game form.

***

And further, just to be clear in reference to McGonigal’s claims in Reality is Broken, Bernard Suits (in The Grasshopper) directly addresses games that are not arbitrarily extended in his discussion of “open games.”

I would define an open game generically as a system of reciprocally enabling moves whose purpose is the continued operation of the system. p. 124

With this definition, Suits does not admit games within which game players have no “state of affairs they are trying to achieve” (i. e., winning conditions), only that some take an “unnecessarily narrow view of what constitutes a state of affairs” (p. 124).

Regardless of this definition, however, in the specific case of Tetris, it seems clear that the objective of the Tetris game player is not to clear blocks in consort and cooperation with the continued operation of the system, but rather to clear blocks in opposition to and in competition with the continued operation of the system.  If so, then Tetris is quite a conventional game and has quite a conventional winning condition.  And, even if not, even if Tetris need be construed as an open game, then it would still have a winning condition:  the continued operation of the system.

I see no intermediate position available to those who claim Tetris has no winning condition.

These calls for ows to become better organized view the movement from a singular and somewhat repressive perspective: one that would subdue and interpret individual behavior within collective action. Sometimes this collective action is called community or compromise or reformation. But it is all the same in that each of these assumes a particular sociology of art.

And why is it suddenly important to note the news media’s aesthetics?

Because….

• The ows movement is an aesthetic protest, and
• An aesthetic protest presents contradictions to conventional culture, institutions, and their organizing principles.

As an aesthetic protest, the ows has its own form, apart from any social organization or control. The news media, burdened by their allegiance to the benefits of collective action, struggle to conceptualize such an event, much less explain it.

And what, exactly, is an aesthetic protest?

It is a protest that, like a work of art, is not bound by the sociological context of its origin.

Unfortunately, with such a claim, I move beyond the ability to explicate matters news-media-style, in stories and packages. I can only briefly reference Adorno’s notion of the formal autonomy of art and, equally briefly, reproduce that which Adorno’s aesthetics would argue most strongly against (as described by Edgar,1990) :

In sum, any work that cannot be attributed a role as entertainment or as of ritual significance within a consensus of values common to significant consumer groups is dismissed as socially irrelevant….The sociology of art thereby becomes an instrument to facilitate the administration of art, and so a form of market research that enables the more efficient coordination of the production and consumption of cultural artefacts.

I am struck by how well this quote describes news coverage of the ows movement. Those calling for more organization seem clearly to be doing so from a position in parallel with what Edgar above calls a sociology of art: i. e., a sociology of protest.

Most obviously, this sociology of protest demands organization from protests in order for those protests to have more effect. But, in the case of the ows movement, the effect has already been had. As an aesthetic protest, the effect is the origin of the ows, not its goal.

For instance, in analogy, we do not fall in love in order to organize our emotions. Nor do we feel anger, or sadness, or dissatisfaction because it would be more effective to do so (even if it later turns out that it would).

Of course, this is not to say that pragmatic, even calculating, human behavior cannot or does not occur. It can and does occur. This very sort of calculated planning and organization — e. g., in order to achieve a particular effect — is the planning and organization of the actor: it is the practice of mimesis and representation. And, as such, it is, at some level, the practice of the politician and disingenuity.

The ows movement, however, unlike (and despite) other protests to which it is often compared, does not at all appear mimetic. Republicans, Democrats, Tea Party members, and the like represent a particular point of view, usually expressed in their choice of a particular iconic representation: a “candidate.”

The ows movement has no candidate, nor needs one — nor any other superficiality to appease cultural morals. It is enough to point out the ongoing ows victories, including revelation of the failure of news media to recognize and explain the human condition without reference to those structures and materials — those organizations — with which they are aligned and sustained.

Remember that, during America’s westward ho, individualism was a primal and positive force, a pioneering spirit that drove us towards what was right as rain, supported in equal parts by the naive enthusiasm of Pecos Bill and the pseudo-sexual violence of John Wayne’s McClintock.

Subsequently, all such instinctive justification for American individualism has been subverted. Instead of natural and good, individualism is mystical and mechanical. No longer swept from her feet, the American heroine’s head is swept from her neck. And instead of riding west to protect the schoolmarm, American heroes simply ride on, into the distance of High Plains Drifters and Terminators.

And yet still, after all this, community and culture would recapture individualism, dead or alive. Brando’s Wild One and Fonda’s Easy Rider are the DOA variety. Still alive are those rugged individualists who, against all odds and much to their own dismay, survive: the lone and the lonely, the Freddy Kruegers and the Jason Bournes.

Pitting the individualism of the Wild West against vested interests of community and culture has come about, strangely and somewhat perversely, with the steady rise of community and culture. The ascension of society brings with it a curious revelation: individualism is not individualism at all. Individualism is but a disguise adopted to serve the social, and the drama of that social has now moved from off-Broadway to on, where actors playing individuals can either speak their lines as written or not speak them at all.

This is essentially the position taken by Markus & Kitayama (1991) (with, according to Google scholar, a staggering 7292 citations!). This analysis elaborately describes the difference between “construals of the self” in Western (prototypically American) and non-Western (prototypically Japanese) culture. The implication throughout is that Western construals of the self — particularly those promoting a philosophical individualism — are more likely the fabrications of Goldwyn than Nietzsche.

Toward the end of their analysis, Markus & Kitayama clarify:

…a persistent issue is how deep or pervasive are these cultural differences?…In other words, is it the case, as we suggest here, that these norms can sometimes be internalized to the extent that they determine the nature of one’s experience? (p. 247)

From this point of view, individualism may play an important role in community and culture, but only if community and culture permit it to do so.

This argument is currently the most critical argument raised against individualism. It is an argument that would retain the function and occasional value of individualism but destroy its core in the natural and biological origin of the human species.

I find this argument, despite offering a vast rhetorical repertory, problematic. It assumes individualism is subordinate to community and culture because everything is. Based on this assumption, individualism has no unique properties; individualism is an instrument of the collective.

I have dealt with this argument before. In a previous century, I delivered a rebuttal to Craig’s (1999) proffer of a “constitutive metamodel” that would do for all non-constitutive metamodels what Markus & Kitayama would do for individualism: absorb it into the collective. This rebuttal made the same point I would like to make now: paradigmatic differences cannot be resolved through social discourse.

It must be said that there are arguments of notes that any model attempting to accomplish what Craig would like his model to do must fail. If the differences among communication theories are truly based on unique paradigmatic assumptions… then it is unlikely any superficial appeal to rhetorical similarities among these theories will mediate their differences. It is rather more likely, as Kuhn (1970) notes, that any attempt at serious theoretical debate between distinctive paradigmatic camps would simple not be effective: “Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial” (p. 149).

…in Myers, D. (2001). A pox on all compromises: Reply to Craig (1999). Communication Theory, 11, 231-240.

In this, Marxists and individualists agree:

Either workers and their allies [here, for “workers,” the naturalist might simply say “body”; and, for “allies,” simply “mind”] claim the real agency that they possess and take the chance of making a world in which they are free in body as well as mind; or they resign themselves to generation after generation of grinding exploitation, settling for the meaningful but insufficient consolations of sporadic, creative, ungrounded, and symbolic resistance.

…in Cloud, D. L., Macek, S. & Aune, J. A. (2006). “The Limbo of Ethical Simulacra”: A Reply to Ron Greene. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 39(1), 72-84.

Equally, for individualism, symbolic resistance is not enough.