GESTIÓN DE SUSTANCIAS QUÍMICAS PELIGROSAS

The core contribution is a conceptualization of rules as agents in the process of encoding. Theories of procedural rhetoric suggest that games and, by extension, game designers, can make arguments. Thinking through Alan Turing, Wendy Chun, and John Conway’s work, I

167

demonstrated that emergent behaviors complicate this. While theorists such as Harrell, Bogost, Duke, and Waddington rightfully point to the medium-specific quality of games in representing gestalts, I show that those very gestalts aren’t easily predetermined. In other words, games do make emergent arguments, but they are often not their authors’. Intuitively, this argument not only matches my design practice, but explains the lack of successful procedurally argumentative games. Obviously, I cannot prove that such a lack exists; doing so would be well outside the scope of any scholar. However, if it were the case that procedural arguments were hard to make, then I would expect the best ones to come from post-hoc readings. That is to say, designers would first make games; later, critics/players would assign the meaning they just so happened to produce. At the same time, I freely admit that there are designers who seem successful in making their works speak their ideas. The Witness matches the idea of communicating epiphanies, which Blow described years before he completed it. That said, it took nearly a decade to create. The major flaws in the proceduralist premise broke down into four categories across this dissertation.

5.1.1 Emergent systems are exponentially more difficult to plot as with each added variable.

While scholars such as Latour can plot dozens of agents acting on each other, actually imagining that behaviour working simultaneously is beyond the scope of one mind.

Programming all of those agents with behaviors, no matter how simple, quickly results in chaos. Attempts to tame that chaos with minimum viable products or piecemeal production simply undermines the whole point. Once the subset of the variables are tuned, adding a new one reproduces the chaos, forcing a longer rebalancing, and so on.

5.1.2 There is no standard for a “dominant playing” of a game.

Filmgoers, book-readers, and painting-appreciators have built enough consensus around socially structured modes of reception that, while they may change over time, artists are capable

168

of crafting works with a mode of reception in mind. Even if users do not adhere in exactly the same way, we can imagine that some portion know how to perform a dominant reading. And even if we didn’t, we could at least say that they know how to mechanically create a context for a dominant reading (such as starting from page 1 and continuing sequentially). In the case of games, given that each rule-set is novel, and that players must interpret the rule-set itself, there is breakage. The very instructions are up for interpretation. Solving this might require a meta-level set of rules explaining how to interpret rules.

5.1.3 It is difficult to signal which parts of the game are metaphor, literal, or to be ignored because they make other parts possible.

Certain parts of games are literal and help situate the player in the diegesis. Other elements then work on an abstract level, creating the gestalts that the player then transposes into the diegesis. Determining which is which is difficult. We train students from young ages to detect the parts of their fictional works that are acting literally vs. metaphorically, but these do not transpose in the same way to games. There are also confounding factors: as games abstract the world they represent, they use shorthand or blackboxes or oversimplified mechanisms to avoid representing additional complex components that the design is uninterested in. These kinds of abstraction are not dissimilar to the rest of the rules, which are abstracting at a slightly lesser level. Players need incredibly sophisticated means of distinguishing between these two levels.

5.1.4 There is no universal method to transcribe a dynamic system into a set of static rules.

There are two notable reasons for this. On the one hand, the premise is that rules create unexpected emergent results. Formalizing systems into programmable rules often requires their quantification. However, many topics resist being represented by numbers.

169 5.2 Hindsight and Changes

If I could go back, I would have started with research-creation already in mind. Early on, it was explained to me that research-creation was for scholars who had pre-established a creative practice. It was implied that they had an expertise that they had honed, and it deserved to be respected. It was only after I had maintained four years of regular design practice that I felt confident enough to change my project. I think this is a narrow view of the method. I knew in my heart that I wanted to make games and I was simply too timid to break with the existing view. Many dissertations stand to gain from a complementary creation project, on the premise that it is an experiment validating theory. The problem, as I see it, is that “research-creation” is too useful politically as a nebulous a term to remain useful theoretically. In the way that Suits rejects

Wittgenstein’s use of family resemblances when describing games (McBride 59), the same might be said for Chapman and Sawchuk’s use of Wittgenstein for thinking of creation and research (7). Admittedly, there are political benefits to being under a both nebulous and funded umbrella, and admittedly, it is important to protect the value artists bring to the academy. For this reason, it would have been worthwhile for me to forward, at the start, the idea that research-creation doesn’t need to be a legitimized art practice.