i have some ideas about the disposition a person would require in order to conceive of prison as a game space.
i am uncomfortable with games that benefit from the seemingly game-like qualities of systematically broken systems. maybe this is a reflection of my education about the american legal system and private, for-profit prison facilities that plague People of Color across the United States.
in a way that television cannot, games have (and often exercise) the power to situate systems in a kind of permanence that reflect the insufficient nature of the legal system itself. there is no room for the player to interject into the code and change the way a system works.
what does it mean to “play” within the prison industrial complex? Read the rest of this entry »
Dear Raph,
here are some thoughts on your presentation slides. hopefully this is a better articulation of the brief criticism I gave earlier.
“games are things we play”
we can think of games as: networks of signs, spaces of possibility, mechanical signifiers
games are an expression of ^the constituent parts^ within an “acceptable” range of mathematical complexity
(so say the slides)
let me propose a slight re-thinking:
games are imposed structures (yes: signs, spaces, mechanisms—also, logics (ideologies//”cultural orientations,” subject/verb/object constructions, materialism, etc)) on which we shape “play” into a rehearsal (yes: an mathematically complex expression) that reinforces or maintains the structure itself.*
so, an acceptable “rehearsal” is temporally contingent on
an ability to understand and execute a performance on command,
and the heuristics (provided or borrowed from elsewhere)
serve to functionally guess (as you said) the
complexity and formulation of the “win.” Read the rest of this entry »
