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.

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Kars Alfrink

Kars is a designer, researcher and educator focused on emerging technologies, social progress and the built environment.