This is the way the world ends.

---

Quote:

If we play Space Invaders (Taito 1977), we are presented with an ideal story that we have to realise using skill. A prehistory is suggested in Invaders: An invasion presupposes a situation before the invasion. It is clear from the science fiction we know that these aliens are evil and should be chased away. So the title suggests a simple structure with a positive state broken by an external evil force. It is the role of the player to recreate this original positive state. This is, of course, a sequence often found in folk tales: An initial state, an overturning of this state, and a restoration of the state.

But it works in a different way: If we play Space Invaders, we find that we cannot actually restore the initial state; we cannot win since every wave of aliens is followed by another. As players we are fighting to realise an ideal sequence of events, but the actual playing is not this sequence.

---

Reading that excerpt, I envision a hollywood pitch. Never ending waves of sequels descending from the sky. One wave of aliens defeated only to instigate another attack... lather, rinse, repeat.

Thanks to this article I can start counting the days until the sequel to Independence Day hits the theaters.

Rama

Man, that's a funny excerpt. I wish I had used that instead of the chess thing.

I wonder if the site is some elaborate parody. Erik, are you behind this? :)

It has to be a parody, and the fact that we're scratching our heads over it implies some slight genious. No one could be this pretentious - could they?

I dunno. There's pretentious, and then there's just plain stupid. ;)

- Alan

I had nothing to do with this, though I wish I did. I started to read one of the articles, but had trouble even understanding the author's biography:

"Markku Eskelinen is an independent scholar and experimental writer of ergodic prose, interactive drama, critical essays and cybertext fiction."

They try to sneak this by you, but I think "independent scholar" is a lot like "self-licensed doctor". I understand interactive drama: that's where the actors walk out into the audience [Elliott, Chris. "Zoo Animals On Wheels"] But what is ergodic prose? Here's a definition I found on another site:

"In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages."

My trail of scholarship ended here with "extranoematic responsibilities", a term I am not familiar with and for which I can find no further definition.

Evidently, most of these people are from Finland. Between this and Max Payne, I predict that Finland will soon be known not only as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and sometimes Switzerland, but as the gaming capital of the world.

I found this non-definition of extranoematic.

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~runnion/314/fall99/performance/bryan/extranoematic.html

I posted too soon.

http://www2.daily.umn.edu/~blakeman/linkd2.htm

Man, this is funny stuff. The plot thickens:

http://www.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/~lili_lab/virtseminare/umt/seminar/sitzungen/11-18-99/cybertext/cybertext.htm

We have: "The Cybertextual process effectuates a semiotic sequence. This selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of 'reading' do not account for. Aarseth calls this phenomenon: ERGODIC from ergon (work) and hodos (path)"

And then later apparently the English language is too fragile for the author to convey his intent, because he moves from English to German (?) in mid-sentence.

"Cybertext produces verbal structures for aesthetic effects, Was ist die paraverbale Dimension von Cybertexten? was ist das MEHR?"

I dunno - I'm having to do some nontrivial effort to understand all this, and I'm failing. Back to comic books for me!

If these people have their way, this excerpt from the paper "Beyond Myth and Metaphor" could quite possibly represent the future of gaming:

"An example of this type of narrative is the hypertext fiction Marble Springs by Deena Larsen, a text that invites the reader to explore the map of a Colorado ghost town, and tells, in short poems, about the life of its female inhabitants."

I hereby retract any statement I've ever made in which it may have appeared that I was condemning games where you shoot people in the crotch.

This *has* to all be a hoax. Maybe if I keep telling myself that, it'll all be better.

While I have absolutely nothing to offer this discussion, I don't feel comfortable just lurking in this thread, either.

OK, after further consideration (five minutes), I've decided I'm going to try to get one of my articles published on that site. I'll race you.

Paging Wagner James Au - Mr. Au, are you listening?

Couldn't sleep last night, so I grabbed a book called "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose off the shelf, opened it to a random section and started reading, thinking for sure it would do the trick. Within a couple of pages, I ran across this:

"think of a small drop of ink placed in a large container of water. Whereas the actual volume of material in the ink remains unchanged, it eventually becomes thinly spread over the entire contents of the container. In the phase-space case, the region R1 is likely to behave in a similar way. It may not spread itself over the *whole* of phase space (which is the extreme situation referred to as 'ergodic')..."

Weird.

"The logical evolution (of extranoematic sensuality), then, is a hypertextualization."

I take this to mean that the theater will be supplied with computer mice and there will something for the audience to click on, which will take them elsewhere (out of the theater, if they're lucky).

Just for those who may still be entertaining the idea that this is all a hoax: No, it's not, but it is probably scholarship gone too far. Terms like ergodic, hypertextual, and -- unfortunately, as it's a terrible term -- "extranoematic" have been picked up by postmodern literary critics as useful in discussing Non-linear Fiction -- also known as Hypertext Fiction for obvious reasons. I spent nearly half a semester in college studying this stuff; trust me, it's a bunch of complicated terminology for fairly simple concepts.

The questionable part of all of this is whether these terms are really useful when brought from non-linear fiction over to GAMES, as our friends at this periodical are doing. Or are they just laughable?

...

Okay, they're definitely laughable.

I think they're trying a bit too hard but then I suspect that the goal isn't so much being able to dissect computer games and what makes them work as much as it is digesting computer games, and their structure, into already agreed upon academic terms. I look at the self-conscious phraseology and preemptive strikes against potential, and familiar, argument in many of these essays and see similiarities to legal briefs and long grognard railings about obscure subjects.

This attempt to present a hermetically sealed conclusion worded in an unassailable manner seems to burn up more effort than the actual concepts being discussed. If distilled down to the actual ideas most of us would probably say, "Duh. And?"

Still, I think this is how deep research goes when dealing with things like concept and language. It's not an empirical subject where simply pointing to test results and hypothesis prove a point. This is very squishy ground. Some real insights may come of it after all the 'definitions' and factions find real ground to stand on. And move on to experimenting with more important games than Asteriods. But, hey, it's where I started too.