To: Icycalm
http://culture.vg/forum/topic?f=13&t=2618&start=250
Yay!
I would have liked some constructive criticism, but it is interesting that he saw it.
Also, it was written for a class, so it wasn’t like I had much choice (the professor didn’t like it very much).
Video Game Theology 
I’ll suffer through this in a while, but first I have to ask:
Why do you constantly use the spellings “videogame” and “video game” interchangeably? Can you not decide which one looks better to you?
I mean, considering that’s ostensibly what this blog that I haven’t read yet is half about, one would expect that you wouldn’t be so careless with it.
“Each person expresses their will to power, continually lusting to become the greatest, to beat all challengers, to have the highest score, to eliminate foes without batting an eye, and to dominate the Other – generally not an acceptable standard in common society.”
This is mindblowingly terrible. I don’t know where to begin “constructively” criticizing this, let alone even distilling it.
The bit after the hyphen (which, by the way, is not an em dash) reads like a deflated punchline. It also makes no fucking sense; have you ever heard of sports?
“As well, all game discussed herein will be emergent,”
You haven’t learned a single lesson from icycalm. Which is incredible, as anyone paying attention would notice he only has about five of them to teach and any given two of them you likely already know, but just haven’t gone through them and added “fagot” and “subhuman” in your thought-syntax.
“\where a game is specified as a small number of rules that combine and yield large numbers of game variations for which the players must design strategies to handle.”
The word for that is ELEGANT, not EMERGENT. ELEGANT = SIMPLE YET POSSESSING DEPTH.
Don’t quote any moron without giving thought to what they’re saying just because they happen to have academic credibility bestowed upon them by similar morons with similarly little actual experience with videogames. And thinking, for that matter.
“they can also provide narrative and motivation through aesthetic means”
Read the paragraph where this phrase occurs and explain to me what relevance it has to anything in that paragraph, or anywhere else prior.
“Modern video games have evolved to the point where the rules of the game reflect the rules of the virtual world as well”
THIS IS DUMB AS FUCK.
THE GAME ***IS*** THE VIRTUAL WORLD. THERE IS NOTHING IN THE WORLD THAT IS NOT THE GAME.
“for example, in any Mario game, such as Super Mario Bros.,”
FOR FUCK’S SAKE YOU JUST REFERRED TO “MODERN” GAMES HAVING “EVOLVED” TO THAT “POINT” AND THEN YOU GO BACK TO FUCKING SUPER MARIO BROTHERS.
Dude the layout you have on this site is minimalist to the point it hampers readability. Like, there is no divider between comment posts. They’re all separated by an equal-size line break that makes them all seem like one huge run-on post.
Which is kind of neat, actually, for my purposes, since nobody else will read or comment on this unless they’ve been directed here by icycalm or me.
“Chess presents a greater complexity because each different playing piece moves differently in its rules, whereas checkers only provides one type of playing piece and one type of movement. Thus, the greater the complexity of a game (referring to its rules), the greater its depth (the knowledge and time required to learn the game)”
This is completely false. Have you ever played Go? That game is VASTLY deeper than Chess with several BILLION more permutations and the greatest A.I. developed for it are still struggling to compete with intermediate amateurs. And yet it is among the simplest board games of its kind! There is only ONE type of playing piece and ONE way to play it, much like checkers! Compare Chess to Go, a game with several dozen rules to one with only two, and you discover that Chess is all barbaric tactics and Go is grand strategy.
Read more here: http://users.eniinternet.com/bradleym/Compare.html
There is no inherent correlation between complexity and depth. Certainly not a positive one.
HOLY SHIT I AM LITERALLY THE THIRD PERSON TO HAVE COMMENTED ON THIS BLOG
GET A LIFE, DUDE.
HOLY SHIT I AM LITERALLY THE THIRD PERSON TO HAVE COMMENTED ON THIS BLOG
DUDE, I NEED TO GET A LIFE.
Posted by Seldon in this thread: http://joybooth.net63.net/forum/index.php?topic=59.0
Not to be terribly pedantic, but “several billion more” is a massive understatement. Even “several billion [i]times[/i] more” wouldn’t cut it. The number of possible games on a 19 x 19 Go board is actually several hundred orders of magnitude larger than the number of possible chess games. If you took the number of legal chess positions and multiplied it by the number of atoms in the observable universe you wouldn’t even come close to the number of Go positions.
The difference in the number of possible games is even greater.
Two quadrillion possibilities collapse into one within the first six moves.
1. It’s not that I don’t care about “video game” versus “videogame” – I just didn’t pick it up in editing. Sorry, I didn’t know we had to be so stringent about such things.
2.The (underscore) in footnotes is because, using LaTeX, I do not know yet how to place underscores in the text (LaTeX takes time to learn, as it’s not a word processor).
3. I don’t think Juul is entirely irredeemable, but his definition for emergent games works well enough (for the purpose of an academic environment, you must cite academic sources and it would be stupid of me if I didn’t want a high grade). Perhaps the definition can be reduced down to “elegant”, but that’s not the point here. I’m not sure when citing an author became tacit approval of everything he/she/it said. Or I can place a throwaway line like “-in a word, elegant,” but that would not display the idea as clearly.
4. “While, at base, they still operate under a set of arbitrary rules and challenges, they can also provide narrative and motivation through aesthetic means” is the full sentence. I was trying to give the idea that video games don’t need an instruction booklet or manual at all time – some games, elegantly designed (har), allow the player to understand the rules without, let’s say, the incessant screaming of a tutorial box or “companion” who constantly assaults you with useless information. Super Mario Bros. seems a pretty good example. Mega Man X is another pretty good example. I’m not making a value judgement on the quality of the games but the way they help the player learn to play the game (that sounds horrible). I though the end of the section made the connection clear, but I guess not! It also helps if you’re reading entire paragraphs, rather than taking lines out of context.
5. I didn’t even know “Go” existed, so thanks for that! Even so, I’m trying to introduce the subject to a layman – i.e., someone who has never played video games at all. As such, why bother using a more complex example, whereas the simpler example conveys the point faster due to familiarity? Perhaps if I was talking to an expert, I can see the usefulness in using “Go”, but it does not fit the context of the paper’s audience.
6. I’m not much of a mathematician, but hyperbole sounds better!
7. “Modern video games have evolved to the point where the rules of the game reflect the rules of the virtual world as well” – There are two sets of rules, if you’re thinking of the game itself, and the virtual world presented, as two seperate things. This is from Juul, as I remember, with the “half-real” distinction. It’s almost like a Cartesian dualism, so I will concede that I think you’re right on this one (opinions change!).
And furthermore, I’m guessing you only looked at the part having to do with video games, rather than the connections to Nietzsche and such. It is an argument for a particular position, and as such the assumptions and definitions given in the beginning seek to clarify how the terms are used later in the article.
Is this DJ Orwell? I think it is!