Reading these articles and presentations, I was reminded of the concept of \u201clock-in\u201d as discussed by Jaron Lanier in his manifesto You Are Not a Gadget<\/i>. Lanier describes \u201clock-in\u201d as the idea that the flaws and biases of the inventor become encoded in the invention, and that once a piece of technology reaches critical mass of standardization\/involvement in people\u2019s everyday life, we\u2019re essentially stuck with those biases. Furthermore, not only are we stuck with them, but they redefine reality. Growing up, for instance, in a media landscape of music that was almost exclusively produced using tools using the now-standard language of MIDI, a whole generation\u2019s idea of what music can be now excludes by default all of the tones that can\u2019t be played on a keyboard, since that was the only instrument MIDI was originally meant for. Like the subjects of\u00a0Blakemore and Cooper\u2019s experiments who never learned to perceive horizontal lines, perhaps humans who are only ever exposed to a limited definition of what\u2019s possible in a medium lose the ability to perceive alternative possibilities.<\/p>\n
It is with that in mind that I read things such as Tale of Tales\u2019 Over Games<\/i> presentation and feel a deep frustration with the tone that the current discourse around games has taken. So much effort is having to be taken in order not to step on fragile egos and unleash backlash from the mainstream gaming community; It\u2019s like someone is trying to invent the violin, and gangs\u00a0of keyboard players are attacking\u00a0them on Twitter and sending swat teams to their house. While marginalized developers are having to delicately craft arguments explaining that they\u2019re not trying to take anyone\u2019s FPS away while they simply carve out space for themselves in a\u00a0community, society at large falls further and further away from being able to remember that other\u00a0definitions of \u201cgame\u201d are possible. I have spoken to people whose opinions I otherwise trust about games like\u00a0Dear Esther<\/i> or Proteus<\/i> and heard it said too many times that the games were \u201cnot successful.\u201d It\u2019s one thing for a game to not be of your personal taste, but when I hear the claim that something is not “successful,\u201d I can\u2019t help but wonder\u00a0what dumbed-down ideas about what a game can be have already become too locked-in to our culture to reverse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reading these articles and presentations, I was reminded of the concept of \u201clock-in\u201d as discussed by Jaron Lanier in his manifesto You Are Not a Gadget. Lanier describes \u201clock-in\u201d as the idea that the flaws and biases of the inventor become encoded in the invention, and that once a piece of technology reaches critical mass<\/p>\n