/lit/ - Literature

>>9720843
>i think if you take some levi-strauss savage mind type cultural anthropology type stuff and through it at an invention like the sphere grid or the turn based battle system (as a form of temporality? idk) you've got a structuralist revival on your hands. the possibilities are endless because anime and vidya are media that are completely un-self-conscious about trying to make the most appealing commodity.

This really got me thinking and I'd like to talk more about this actually. I think this is a pretty neat idea. Base your vidya mechanics on philosophical concepts, or theories of mind...or use game mechanics to get at the aesthetics. Don't lose your mind asking *what* is transcendentally beautiful (everything!), ask *how* it is beautiful, and pick a theory of aesthetics to communicate accordingly. *Show* someone how it would feel.

And also this: there's no point (or diminishingly) in being *critical* in the way we used to. Games are supposed to be fun. Certain games make more *sense* when they are looked at from some perspectives rather than others. The meme critical mentality comes in when you start looking at a game through the wrong lens, the wrong perspective.

Take icycalm, for instance. He's got a complete theory of games. As a critic he is an auteur. He likes brutal Cave shooters, FPSs and so on, and he endorses the theory that goes with. He likes what he likes. Ok.

Pic rel is a favorite of mine. Personally I think it goes very well with Deleuze. *Yes,* you could look at it from a Marxist view, a Heideggerian view, whatever. But I think the best reading of the game itself arrives when you pick a certain philosopher to go with it.

Games *virtualize.* Philosophers *virtualize.* This is where things get interesting. Because games are, in a sense, a kind of plane of immanence. Yes, of course, there is the larger world surrounding it, all of this. But with games you go in there in order to disappear into that interesting space where the aesthetics and the mechanics meet.

I'm trying to do two things at once:

a) reduce fuckface criticism (running a tired Freudo-Marxist protocol on all games, w/ev), b/c this leads to soul-crushingly boring criticism, irony, &c

b) think about how and what games are, how they work, and so on.

What *game* best expresses Heidegger? What game best expresses Nietzsche? What game best expresses Deleuze? And so on. Because if you think of philosophies as being ultimately teachable, experiential, not-just-textual, then it stands to reason you could make interesting *virtual experiences,* aesthetic experiences, that illustrate some of this.

I mean with the big guys, of course, you can look at any game through their concepts. As in cinema, you can find objet a, Being, smooth and striated spaces, if you go looking hard enough for them. But maybe it would be more interesting to think in terms of games designed along these ideas, designed along these principles...

Forget *text.* Games are new territory.