I also like the revision to the note!

Glad you’re a fellow Sudnow fan! PitM was the first major text for my undergraduate computer games course last Spring. I’m hoping it’ll get back into print some time before too long.

Funny you should mention _Pilgrim_, as I’m also currently working with it. I think it’s a great text to invoke here, especially as it seems to counterbalance Galloway and Thacker. This is to say that for Sudnow, nothing could have been more sublime than complete and utter immersion in an informatic system. In fact, the phenomenologist claims he was most successful when his body and the game apparatus’ (that of the Atari VCS) seemed to be working in complete unison — an aesthetic in-corporation of operator and machine.

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Of course, at the same time that processes come into operation through audience actions at the surface, process and surface also define some of the possibility space for audience actions, and thereby shape the audience. For example, while an audience member may, at any time, press a particular button on a console controller — which may or may not have any meaning in the current game — for many games the process of successful play requires becoming trained to reflexively take the actions that are recognized by the system. The intervention of conscious thought would make it impossible to time a sequence of leaps in a game such as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (discussed in a later chapter). In the context of a much earlier game (the version of Breakout for the Atari VCS) this is one of the core observations of what may be the first classic book in computer game studies: David Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld. In other words, the relationship between audience experience and system operations includes both the interpretive work of the audience and the system’s shaping of the audience that performs the interpretation.

In a series of comments on Grand Text Auto, Bryan G. Behrenshausen (2008) drew my attention to how this is formulated in Alex Galloway’s work. For example, in his collaborative book with Eugene Thacker, The Exploit:

[F]orms of informatic play should be interrogated not as liberation from the rigid constraints of systems of exchange and production but as the very pillars that prop those systems up. The more video games appear on the surface to emancipate the player, raise his or her status as an active participant in the aesthetic moment, the more they enfold the player in codified and routinized modes of behavior. (Galloway and Thacker, 2007, 115)

That said, the system itself is far from the only force shaping the audience. Those skilled player/dancers who add additional physical flourish to their interaction with Dance Dance Revolution do so not from the encouragement of its sensor pad and on-screen instructions (which regard their performance as no different from one who takes the minimal physical actions). The crowds that gather around them in the arcade know this.

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How does that strike you?

Thanks for a nice chat!

That said, I think the manuscript as a whole might benefit from more attention to the areas of emphasis you’re describing — and I’d certainly appreciate it if you could draw my attention to appropriate moments for such shifts as the review continues. It might also be good to put a note here, making it clear that it’s important that we not conceive of this relationship on the purely conscious level.

I don’t necessarily agree that the issues we’re discussing are part of “the relationship between the audience’s experience and the system’s internal operations” — though they do influence audience experience. When describing the materialization of bodies as they are real-ized by informatic systems, I’m thinking of moments that are pre-concious, or logically anterior to conscious experience. Understanding audience interpretations is critical — for sure! — but we can’t forget that the bodies that could potentially produce these interpretations are rendered in particular ways _even before they’re privileged with the capacity for interpretation_. The moment of “contact” you describe above — and that’s the perfect word to use, too — marks a fissure that enables-constrains action and opens-closes what you call “possibility spaces.”

So I suppose I would say “yes” when you state that I’m “talking about how the structures of digital media shape who we are when we experience and interpret it.” But this process is not always one of conscious experience.

Here I use my understanding of process: the organizational procedure as ONE dimension of the activity process, including the materiality of the process as the other dimension.

I follow you in that we can reduce a process to the abstract functioning and strip off the material dimension.

But as soon as we analyse concrete processes even computational processes without any audience we encounter the effects of the material dimension.

Piaget understands those formal structures like we understand software as (mind-)maschines.

have you thought about the relation between your operational logic to the cognitive structures of Piagets Theory?

Barbara

Lately I have been trying to think through what McKenzie Wark in _Gamer Theory_ calls “the final question for gamer theory” (paragraph 233). Namely: how does one “move beyond the phenomena of gaming as experienced by the gamer to conceive of gaming from the point of view of the game?” (ibid). I find this such a poignant challenge that I return to it every time I attempt to read, write, or think about video games and the practice of video gaming. I know how I “interpret” the games I play, but I wonder how the digital apparatus is complicit in constituting the subject who’s making those interpretations. How is the material space in which those interpretations take place always already structured by the code or process or algorithm?

Galloway and co-author Eugene Thacker in _The Exploit: A Theory of Networks_ carefully note the ways in which “human action is parsed according to specific physical algorithms” (p. 113) And they prompt: “Imagine the ‘noise sequences’ that have been erased” (p.113) in situations of _processes_ “interpreting” _operators_.

How are infinite complexities parsed by/for machinic and algorithmic entities? Exploring the “effects” of audience-operation relationships (the project your book undertakes) must be sensitive to the ways in which the audience is also such an effect. Yes, “the operations of digital media are . . . only truly realized in contact with audiences.” But how am I realized by the informatic systems that modulate, modulate, modulate to structure possible spaces for my activities, my existence? The value of a wiki’s processes are important indeed, but what of my value in relationship to them? When certain voices are privileged by an algorithm — realized in a database — how do I materialize from the “point of view of the game [or process]?”

One final quote from _The Exploit_ (since I just love it too much to let it sit here on my desk): “. . . [F]orms of informatic play should be interrogated not as liberation from the rigid constraints of systems of exchange and production but as the very pillars that prop those systems up. The more video games appear on the surface to emancipate the player, raise his or her status as an active participant in the aesthetic moment, the more they enfold the player in codified and routinized modes of behavior” (p. 115).

In paragraph no. 4, you preview the many facets of your argument regarding the “relationship between the audience’s perception of a work’s processes and the actual internal operations.” The “effects” of this relationship you detail in this paragraph seem to favor the “human” or “operator” axis (if we’re still thinking in terms of Galloway’s model) — that is to say, the way audiences experience media, the way processes are suitable for human needs, and the way humans “make sense” of media. I wonder how the “other side” of this relationship might look: how processes constrain human experience or agency, how the materiality of processes is altered in interaction (with humans or non-humans), or how this materiality structures various subjectivities? Appreciating the action and motion of code and process might help us view it as something other than that which is merely lying dormant, waiting to be “read” or “interpreted” by the almighty human observer.

I think you’re absolutely right that not all processes happen in interactive response to the audience. What I really mean to say is that, when we’re talking about media, we shouldn’t forget that there is an audience. When I say that I want to think about “the relationship between the audience’s experience and the system’s internal operations” in many cases the relationship includes audience lack of knowledge and misunderstanding. To investigate these sorts of relationships I advocate seeing the processes two ways: both as they are constructed and as the audience experiences them.

So, really, I think I’m basically in agreement with you and Gaming on this point. Is there a revision to phrasing, or perhaps a footnote, that you think might help clarify this?

I think the phrases “processes . . . don’t operate on their own” and “media are . . . only truly realized in contact with audiences” made me think immediately of Galloway’s chapter because the first chapter of _Gaming_ seems to point to gamic moments in which process can in fact operate apart from human intervention (moments such as ambience acts). For instance, Galloway calls an “ambience act . . . an action executed by the machine and thus emanat[ing] outward toward the operator (assuming he or she has stuck around to witness it)” (p. 11). I take this to mean that process can operate independently of human presence — that video games, for instance, can in fact “operate on their own.”

Galloway also seems very explicit about the fact that process is much more than merely “what humans ‘make’ of it.” This is to say: is a process really no-thing until a human comes into contact with it? Galloway’s work aims to “resist equating gamic action with a theory of ‘interactivity’ or the ‘active audience’ theory of media. Active audience theory claims that audiences always bring their own interpretations and receptions to the work. instead, I embrace the claim, rooted in cybernetics and information technology, that an active medium is one whose very materiality move and restructures itself . . .
(p. 3).

I understand the aim of your book is to directly explore the way(s) in which human beings interpret code, and thus your concern lies more squarely in the notion of audience and interpretation. However, would a nod to previous work on the ontology of various action(s) be appropriate here?

Thanks for taking the time to listen to my ramblings. I’m enjoy the book so far, Noah!

Also, I’ve been intrigued by Nick’s suggestion that Gaming’s model be extended with an axis ranging from computation to playback. As Nick says, this is related to Chris Crawford’s notion of process intensity (discussed earlier in this chapter of EP). If you have any thoughts about this angle I’d also be intrigued.

Galloway’s model does not immediately jibe with the definition of “interaction” you outline in paragraph no. 5 (i.e., Galloway’s discussion of non-diegetic machine action allows for machinic capacity to influence code or process), but might help push the scope of this particular chapter a bit.

And please don’t shush. It’s been great to have you engaged with the project!

On the first and last lines here, I think the first blunt and direct comment on this subject I know of was made by Ermi and Mayra (2005), ‘Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience” from DiGRA in Vancouver — and the full ref would be to the edited volume of papers — but that was certainly the position that informed the editorial of Videogame, Player, Text, and a fair few of the essays in that volume. I don’t know how footnote heavy this volume is going to be, but if you are going to make the ‘little mention’ move do you think some citation of that growing body of work (at least in game studies) might be?