algorithm
illudere ex illusion!
Allude/elude/delude!
Typology of ludic Deconstruction
A comparative methodological hierarchy of modifications as source for creative games and play
1. Cheats as creative game
The cheat is another phenomenon, that can be considered as an appearance of creative gaming while keeping the game system running. It is more reflecting the system itself in a self referential way. Laing in his reflection about selfreferenatiality entitled "knots" is saying: "They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game."
2. Stress, Speed runs
Another creative game is the method of playing a game without any cheat or without quitting the game in another way. Quake done quick was one of the most interesting examples for that. To play the game in the quickest way possible was its target. Instead of weeks in 2 hours. Avoid the difficulties of not dying, still getting enough points to be abel to go on playing etc. This quake done quick had to be proofed and so it was the naissance of the another cultural modification praxis, the machinima. The life record of a run through a game.
3. Machinima
Machinima is a techno-neologism that sounds for western ears asiatic, when intonated as described on the communities websites. Ordinary the terms meaning is described as a combination of machine, cinema and animation. Structurally it means a movie made with the help of a game-engine. Such a game-engine is a modular software for real time rendering of a game, for its graphics and physics. The praxis of making a machinima leaves the genre of gaming behind and opens it into transformative playing. Katie Salen, the game designer and researcher was making this differentiation, Salen (2002). The reuse of these engines introduces a new classification of game technologies into a creative class of game-software based visuals. My intention is to bring to the fore the cultural transfer of thinking-models. The praxis of machinima making shall be compared to the arising contemporary modding cultures in technologies.
5. Modding, Game Mods
Moddingis a term that stands for the intentional modification of software's code classes in game engines as well as for individual modifications of the hardware on which the software is executed. At least the similarities in the way of dealing with given technological frameworks and code-material, which is the matter of condition (Bedigung der Möglichkeit) for cultural change, are giving ground enough for a serious comparison method in relation to the addressed phenomenon of machinima movie making. These particular types of modification produce its very own computer literacy.
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6. Total Conversion
A total conversion addresses the basis of a computer game, its game engine. A total conversion, in the gaming sense, is a modification of an existing game where the end result bears little resemblance to the original on which the conversion was based. Many games provide players with the ability to edit the game's many elements: levels, sounds, enemies, and so on. Most modifications are limited in scope, resulting in a partial conversion. Total conversions are less common, mainly because of the large amount of development and man-time needed to bring a whole project together. The total conversion, coming from a praxis of modification and crack of consumer games, is a work which can not be directly commercialised, because of its difficult legal situation between proprietary code and non proprietary code, because it is just in the middle between affirmation and critique. This is valid for "software art" or "Game Art" in general, but especially for the work, that serves as anchor point here. In the line of the climax.at works, open source parts are interwoven into a commercial game engine. "É the fact that it is not a description or a representation of something, but, on the contrary, it directly affects, and literally sets in motion Ð or it even ÈkillsÇ a process. This Ècoded performativityÇ has immediate, also political consequences on the actual and virtual spaces (or: programmed environments), in which we are increasingly moving and living: it means, ultimately, that this coded performativity has the potential to mobilise or immobilizes its users." Inke Arns states this in her essay on the nybble-engine works for a Rt&D, V2_Organisation, Rotterdam, October 2004.
7. Game punk. Anger is an energy. Nihilism and iconoclasm
Illusion/ Il-ludere = playing through/ transformative play! Unlike TV news broadcasting, the users of computer games have little difficulty in distinguishing between the creation of real as opposed to illusory worlds in that games are clearly labeled as such. But on the side of the game producers we can observe that, the propaganda of consumer games lulls players into accepting ideological conditions, in such a way that the design and story of 'shoot them up' games necessitates the 'war against terrorism.' As introduction I take the source of the nowadays networked cybernetic environments, the private cybernetics symposions in the mid of 20th century and its effects in the early 70ies as general "cybernetic illusion" for the control of life and politics. The implementation of networked cybernetic environments based on "circular and causal feedback processes in biological and social systems", we witness nowadays merely in the on line i.e. Real Games by Real Players, often also called massive multi player on line games and in its creative transformations, either by fan cultures or artists. The emergence of a new networked paradigm for the construction of frameworks for theory I see in the very contemporary social closed circuit group of PC gamers, the players through games, the il-ludere in the ludic-society. A new cybernetic illusion differing form Baudrillards notion of the unidirectional media and also differing from the 70ies pragmatic and obvious cybernetic illusion of the application of cybernetics in AI and state control as Allendes Chile Experiment Project Cybersyn. The symposion in the greek sense, more in the original greek sense as discursive party, is taking place in the shooter turnier, the tournament of groups and collectors of technohistory nowadays. (flipperhuhn.at) The playing through a game becomes reason for a symposion understood as party with a certain professional interest in a specific discipline. First we can see an aspect of real life effects of so called gaming behaviours and actions, Secondly we can see beside these very subjective personal consequences also a generalised political aspect of the reconfiguration of media systems that are very different from the mass media concepts discussed and developed in so called media theories up to now. Jean Beaudrillard«s 70ies notion of the implosion of the institutions by it super developed forced feedback circuits and cybernetic control relays is not as outdated as it seems tobe, if one reflects the radical changes of the media systems itself, when the positions of sender and recipient are dissolved. Interestingly Beaudrillard already changes the definition of the problem of mass media as a pure technological problem. In his reflection on Enzensbergers Baukasten Theorie der Medien he comes to the point that always just the spoken aspect, the way of reading a code and finding a praxis to read it - <> and how to speak Ð die rede - is the main problem, that goes over the problem of getting access to technological structures. Changing roles, reversing circuits, developing its own codes was stated as postulatum to reach, to go beyond the cybernetic illusion and to accept the chance that cybernetic systems are offering, that were heavily criticise by the critical theories of enlightenment and mass deception. In the reading of Enzensberger again the underground press serves as example, how its own codes are developed and distributed by a sub culture, a political economy of communication is brought into discussion. Deleuze Guattari will call this later minor media operations. The illusionary is to underestimate the possibilities of the system of feedback and circular causality as a basic logics of cybernetics.
8. Game Arts
The socially constituted expectations of Games and Art must be taken into consideration in terms of the aspect of viability. This means that a reflection-theoretical artwork dealing with games and their codes, that claims to preserve complexity must still articulate itself in forms that are still identifiable as game and art at the same time. In this way, Game Art processes along the system/environment difference, at the very edge, so to speak, within which the intensification of artÕs ability to dissolve and recombine can still reproduce self-modifying Game Art. It is not the aim to explore existence in any form for the purpose of attaining insights with artistic means and methods, but rather to discursive questions that relate to the how and the viability of commercial games, open source codes and art in its respectively current social context.