A Bunch of Stuff That May or May Not Make Sense

This article is going to be very unfocused. I'm working through some ideological issues.

Today has been a hell of a day for my experience as a blogger. I was writing a post about fundamental elements of game design when I tried to look up the name of the first game that Odyssey creator Ralph Baer created for a one-off joke. As I checked the most reputable sources I could (read: Wikipedia,) I started to find essays and articles about video game theory that were very academic and in-depth. Now, six hours later, I have just finished a keynote speech by Ian Bogost about video game ontology that dealt with everything from the ludology/narratology to metaphysics. Its been a bit of a maze.

As I was reading these, I started to think that my career as a theorist was over before it had begun. I was operating on the belief that video game theory was non-existent. In fact, it was flourishing right under my nose and getting into metaphysical discussions about Kant and melting my brain with its awesome academicism. I can't operate on this level; I just don't have the background in philosophy to really get into that discussion. Then I had the realization that they still weren't talking about what I want to talk about, which is the theory of game aesthetics and how to create meaning. They were abstracting video games into a realm which I have no business being in; ontology. I didn't even know the meaning of the word until tonight. It is the philosophical study of being and reality, by the way. I'm more into how art creates meaning, not whether or not art is real. So I can breathe something of a sigh of relief now I guess.

Closer to my realm, Bogost and Jesper Juul (another theorist and designer) have both come to a conclusion I find very interesting; that games are a mixture of the real and the fictional. Every game has a real set of rules imposed upon a fictional narrative and world. No other art form really has this issue because video games have the distinction of having a real person in real time imposing their will on a fictional universe. This is what makes video games as an artistic medium (no matter what some people say) so fascinating. How do you evaluate human interaction artistically? How do you evaluate the play between reality and fiction artistically? These are the questions that video games raise and I would like to answer. Mostly though, I want to help push video games into this cerebral realm so that they can expand as an entertainment system as well as a thought-provoking work of art. 

Again, this is very unfocused and more for me than anyone reading this blog. If anything, this is just to show you guys that its not that I'm being lazy, I'm just working through some heavy shit. Any ideas I have right now are more like dough than wedding cake so I'm working on it. I'll have a review up next week of...something. I swear.