It is my belief that videogames are irreducibly pseudoscientific, being composed of such subject-object dissolves, and that failing to account for their status as such will only serve to cut off those speculative possibilities best prepared to advance the medium. […] The relations between gamefulness and artfulness and playfulness are by no means well understood, and the prophetic power of the notgames idea has not at all been exhausted. Notgames have their formal structures, too, and I am interested in exploring them. […] I’d been calling Infinite Sketchpad a game, and I still do, but it can be considered as such only if irrational games are allowed to exist. […] Attempting to allow a maximally intensified/living Art to coexist (become One with?) a maximally intensified/living Maths is the most promising project of videogames, as far as I’m concerned. A new kind of Hippasusian-Pythagorean approach is wanting, where we DO NOT think that it sucks for games to be all about math, because math is not regarded as over-rational reductionism but is rather, as it has always been, the formalization of the players of metaphysics itself, the One, the Many, the parts and the wholes, the rationals and irrationals, and their relations and inconsistencies— the games that they play.
wombflash forest: Infinite Sketchpad / I Am A Strange Loop
A few outtakes from the rather excellent introductory blog post to David Kanaga’s essay on Infinite Sketchpad. If you like original thinking and challenging notions on games and play then this is required reading. Infinite Sketchpad itself is also a rather curious thing to play with.