Chapter 1 and the basic grasp of video game operations
The first chapter in Alexander Galloway's Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, “Gamic Action, Four Moments”, clearly serves as both an introduction to the book and an introduction to video games as an academic study and as an art-form. While reading you can see that Galloway uses key terms that are fairly easy to grasp, however, some knowledge of computer terms is necessary.
“Gamic Action, Four Moments” presents us with various kinds of activities that take place in computer games. Such activities can be instituted by either the “operator” or the player, or by the machine itself and these activities can be either diegetic (the sphere or world in which these narrated events and other elements occur (dictionary.com)) or not. This first chapter is useful simply on formal grounds because again, this addresses my point of giving us key terms that are fairly easy to grasp but some general knowledge of computer terms in necessary. The chapter also explore some of the deeper issues Galloway is interested in, particularly the importance of “play” as a human activity, and the question of what it means to be in a space governed by algorithms and the programmatic reduction of ambiguity as at the base of every game is codes. A little side note is that it is particularly useful that Galloway uses several games that most people (at least I) are familiar as examples of how the operation of gaming functions work.
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