Reading Response 3 - Frank

Frank Hu

Graphic Arts

                            The Viability of Galloway’s Interpretive Framework

    In his book “Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture”, Alexander Galloway creates an interpretive framework to understand the relationship between people and video games. This framework is extremely inclusive, too much so. In under to understand why, I will first give an overview of the framework and then break it down.

    Galloway quantifies the relationship between humans and video games as the lines connecting four different buckets. In sequence, the buckets are: Operator, Diegetic, Machine, and Nondiegetic. Operator refers to the user, the human. Diegetic represents the game world that is viewable by the human. Machine is, as one would guess, the operating system that constructs the game. Finally, nondiegetic is the world which is not immediately part of the game world; examples include the pause screen and start button.

   The problem with these buckets and the connections between them are that they are too inclusive. If Galloway replaced video games with the word “world”, his framework would still apply. Take for example a physical cup. The connection of operator à diegetic à machine à nondiegetic à operator à etc., would still apply in every situation.

    An individual looking at a cup has to first construct the physical world through visual input. He can then move the cup with a physical action. The visual input received by the individual and the actions observable within it make up the diegetic bucket. Both are done within the “machine” of the world, a single piece of hardware that contains all the interactions possible for the operator, the human. Finally, there is the human mind and the physics which act behind all the possible actions in the world. These represent the nondiegetic. Like the pause screen and start button, they effect the world but are not immediately part of the viewable world.
   If Galloway’s framework is able to incorporate the entire world, then it does a poor job at understanding the specifics of video games. Video games are something distinctively different than playing with a cup, but his framework is capable of incorporating both. He mentions that he “deliberately avoided the assumption – incorrect, in my view that video games are merely games people play on computers”. I can agree with this point, but I cannot agree that video games can be explained using the same mechanisms that explain the human to nature interaction; such an explanation does not explain anything at all.