Saved by Severin Matusek and
How Art Games work - Outland
Games were “designed to reward the kinds of decisions that the game designer thinks are proper,” instilling opaque values and beliefs into players—a critique later leveled at SimCity.69 The model was a “black box,” and even if it was good model, one could not “fathom its complexities by this type of external teasing.”
Chaim Gingold • Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine (Game Histories)
EZRA KLEIN: [C. Thi Nguyen] believes games are a unique kind of not just art form, but just form, medium, because what they manipulate is our agency. You can think of visual arts, like painting, as manipulating what we see. You could think of music as manipulating what we hear. But games— games manipulate what we do, how we do it, why we do i
... See moreNew York Times • Are We Measuring Our Lives in All the Wrong Ways?
“the viewer gets lost in [miniature] objects, and that in the process of projecting mental scenarios onto them they lose sense of themselves physically.” This disorienting disembodiment might account for god games’ lost-time effect, their inducement of compulsiveness. By entering that “private time,” a player is “disarticulated from embodiment and ... See more
Real Life Mag • Colony Collapse - Real Life
Imagine creating infinite games as an act of agency. And imagine how the art of creating infinite games might open a way to an even greater art: the art of choosing better futures, thus expressively steering the medium of spacetime and sculpting our agency in it.
Ian Cheng • Emissary's Guide To Worlding
A game tells us to take up a particular goal. It designates abilities for us to use in pursuing that goal. It packages all that up with a set of obstacles, crafted to fit those goals and abilities. A game uses all these elements to sculpt a form of activity. And when we play games, we take on an alternate form of agency. We take on new goals and ac
... See moreC. Thi Nguyen • Games: Agency As Art (Thinking Art)
