“I believe that games are not art, and will never be art. Let me explain – games will only match their era, meaning what the people of that age want reflects the outcome of the game at that time. So, if you bring a game from 20 years ago out today, no one will say ‘wow.’ There will be some essence where it’s fun, but there won’t be any wows or touching moments. Like a car, for example. If you bring a car from 20 years ago to the modern day, it will be appealing in a classic sense, but how much gasoline it uses, or the lack of air conditioning will simply not be appreciated in that era. So games will always be a kind of mass entertainment form rather than art. Of course, there will be artistic ways of representing games in that era, but it will still be entertainment. However, I believe that games can be a culture that represent their time. If it’s a light era, or a dark era, I always try to implement that era in my works. In the end, when we look back on the projects, we can say ‘Oh, it was that era.’ So overall, when you look back, it becomes a culture.”

-- Hideo Kojima in the July 2006 issue of Game Informer

I like this quote because I can’t figure out if he is really right or just really wrong.

"If architecture is frozen music, then a videogame is liquid architecture." -- Steven Poole, Trigger Happy p.226.

I've always like the provacative connotation of this quote--that videogames were connected more firmly to the classic traditions that people were often willing to give it credit. The notion of "architecture as frozen music" is often attributed to Goethe so the idea has been around for a while. And Poole puts it into an entirely new light.

Now this particular quote takes on new meaning for me because I've recently been accepted into the Ph.D. program in the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado at Denver. So, I'll be spending a lot more time thinking about the nature of architecutre and planning. And, of course, videogames!

I plan on working in the areas of leisure spaces, virtual places and model building. What connects a playground, Disneyland, an architectural model and a videogame? Well, that's one way of asking the question I'm working on solving.

The good new is, videogames look to factor pretty heavily into my research area. So, I'll be able to continue to work inside the field of ludology.

No matter what, it should be an interesting and challenging couple of years coming up. Consider this:

One of the professors in the department, who I have a lot of respect for, told me, "This architecture as frozen music is a stupid idea."

I thought this quote was particularly relevant to a recent discussion about the difference between traditional games and video games.

"It is meritorious and fruitful to have grasped the affinity which exists between play and the secret or mysterious, but this relationship cannot be a part of the definition of play, which is nearly always spectacular or ostentatious. Without doubt, secrecy, mystery, and even travesty can be transformed into play activity, but it must be immediately pointed out that this transformation is necessarily to the detriment of the secret and mysterious, which plays exposes, publishes, and somehow expends. In a word, play tends to remove the very nature of the mysterious."

-- Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (1958)
Translated by Meyer Barash, 1961. p 4.

“We experience not the raw sensory data but a simulation of them. The simulation of our sensory experience is a hypothesis about reality. This simulation is what we experience. We do not experience things themselves. We sense them. We do not experience the sensation. We experience the simulation of the sensation.”

The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, Tor Norretranders (p.289)

“Video games are nerd poetry,” said Ernest Adams during his speech about the philosophical roots of video games.

What follows is a tour of GDC in quotes. The selection is surreal, whatever I wrote down that I feel confident I got down correctly.

I recently interviewed Rand Miller (of Myst fame) for a story I am working on. I especially liked this quote. I think he does a nice job of clarifying the narratology vs. ludology distinction. -- David

"One of the reasons I think Myst was successful was that people are used to being entertained with stories. There're lots of ways to entertain, but the two primary ones are story—which is television and movies and books and all that—and the other is gameplay—blackjack and football and Parcheesi. There’re other ones, but those are two we are very familiar with."

"I think the mass market audience is more familiar with story. The first campfire the guys on the hunt come back with a story to tell--that is something anybody can partake in."

-- Rand Miller, co-creator of Myst and Riven, speaking about his new game Uru

First the quotes, then the point.

"Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats for its problems.Well here I am."
--Marylin Manson

"Rock 'n Roll: The most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear."
-- Frank Sinatra

"Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression."
-- Ralph Ellison

"It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it."
-- Andy Warhol

"Movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century. Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them - as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people".
-- Ben Hecht

"Television is chewing gum for the eyes."
-- Frank Lloyd Wright

"The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little."
-- Ray Bradbury

"We spend a lot of time (in this indsutry) trying to talk people out of spending money today."

-- Kaz Hirai, chief executive officer, Sony Computer Entertainment America at Sony's Gamer's Day, Fall 2003 in response to a question about the PS3.

"The magic of a computer lies in its ability to become almost anything you can imagine, as long as you can explain exactly what that is. The hitch is in explaining what you want. With the right programming, a computer can become a theater, a musical instrument, a reference book, a chess opponent. No other entity in the world except a human brain has such an adaptable, universal nature. Ultimately all these functions are implemented by the Boolean logic blocks and finite-state machine described in the previous chapter...."

Daniel HIllis, "The Pattern on the Stone" 1998, p 39.

"Games are popular art, collective social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism. Both games and technologies are counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of the specialized actions that occur in any social group. As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the actions and the reactions of whole populations in a single dynamic image."

---Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man