Quotes on Games

“The artful surfaces of the game are just a way for the gamer to intuit their way through the steps of the algorithm. Hence the paradox of Vice City. It’s criminal world is meant to be shocking to the literary or cinematic imagination, where there is a still a dividing line between right and wrong and where description is meant to actually describe something. But to a gamer, it’s just a means to discover and algorithm.”

 - McKenzie Wark in Gamer Theory (2007)

“To be a gamer is to come to understanding through quantifiable failure.”

 - McKenzie Wark in Gamer Theory (2007)

“The gamer discovers a relationship between appearances and algorithm in the game, which is a double of the relation between appearances and a putative algorithm in gamespace - that’s allegorithm.”

 - McKenzie Wark in Gamer Theory (2007)

“Uncritical gamers do not win what they desire; they desire what they win. The score is the thing. The rest is agony.”

 - McKenzie Wark in Gamer Theory (2007)

“…a basic feature of make-believe games. Each ‘move’ (if we may call it that) either is for the purpose of evoking a dramatic response, or is such a response, or is both. But these evocations and responses really are evocations and responses; they are not merely representations of such interplay, as is the case in staged performances.”

 - Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper (1978)

“There is, I suggest, an institution of chess that can be distinguished from any individual game of chess. Because of this institution is it possible, for example, to take a knight out of box of chessmen and describe its capabilities, even though the knight is not then functioning as a knight, that is, as a piece in the game of chess.”

 - Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper (1978)

“Now consider this statement ‘Tennis is a game where two people hit a ball using a racket.’ This statement is true in the normal sense: It is about the real world, and it described how the game of tennis is actually played. Let us then look at a computer game, Tetris… We can make the following statement about Tetris: 'In Tetris, when you have covered an entire row, it disappears.’ This is a statement about the real world much like the previous statement about tennis. The rules for Tetris are not physical but programmed; but this does not change the fact that it is a verifiable statement about the real world (p. 167).”

 - Jesper Juul in Half-Real (2005)

“…the fictional aspect of a game can lose importance over time as the player learns to ignore elements of the fictional world that are not implemented in the rules (p. 96).”

 - Jesper Juul in Half-Real (2005)

“Our central purpose is the construction of situations, that is, the concrete construction of temporary settings of life and their transformation into a higher, passionate nature.”

 - Guy DeBord  in  Towards a Situationist International  (1957),  translated  by  Tom McDonough

“…the author offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee, a work to be completed. He does not know the exact fashion in which his work will be concluded, but he is aware that once completed the work in question will still be his own. It will not be a different work, and, at the end of the interpretive dialogue, a form which is his form will have been organized, even though it may have been assembled by an outside party in a particular way that he could not have foreseen. The author is the one who proposed a number of possibilities which had already been rationally organized, oriented, and endowed with specifications for proper development.”

 - Umberto Eco in The Poetics of the Open Work (1962)

“Every performance makes the work an actuality, but is itself only complementary to all other possible performances of the work. In short, we can say that every performance offers us a complete and satisfying version of the work, but at the same time makes it incomplete for us, because it cannot simultaneously give all the other artistic solutions which the work may admit.”

 - Umberto Eco in The Poetics of the Open Work (1962)

“Games can be a kind of philosophy, a kind of homebrew neuroscience, a martial art in which you get to eat pretzels and drink beer, a spiritual discipline made out of math, a way of thinking about thinking, a way of becoming more consciously aware of our thoughts and beliefs and decisions and learning about complex and counterintuitive truths about ourselves and the universe. So as we reinvent gaming as the dominant art form of the 21st century, I just want to remember that games can do that.”

 - From a talk by Frank Lantz at TEDx Philedelphia (2010)

“It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult (p. 65).”

 - From Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it (p. 32).”

 - From Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert

“The ergodic work of art is one that in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful users (p. 179).”

 - Espen Aarseth in Cybertext (1997)