As I read "Gamic Action, Four Moments" by Alexander Galloway, I started to think of video games much more analytically, whether it be as complex as Mass Effect and World of Warcraft or as simple as PacMan and Snake. Yes it can be agreed that video games are an art form, but what separates this art from other is its action-based medium. You as the gamer, or operator, are required to take action on the controller, keyboard, hand-held device, etc. There are interactive forms of art such as the drawing machine examples we explored in class on the processing page. What separates a drawing machine from a video game has many parts. For one, video games have a very specific set of rules that the operator must abide by. These rules are enforced by the designer of the game in order to challenge the gamer to achieve the goal. The goal is also what sets apart the drawing machine and video game. It is the end that the operator is working towards with the use of their actions, whether it be a score, saving a damsel in distress, acquiring currency, etc. A drawing machine has no programmed ending and will continue to run until the user has chosen not to take action. The idea of rules do not apply to the drawing machine like they do to gaming. You cannot lose in a drawing machine, nor does a score suffer. The program may crash due to uninterpreted action from the user but that is linked to the programming rather than the operator.
What I found particularly interesting in this article was Galloway's interpretation of the pause function embedded in most if not all games. "Pause acts are, in reality, the inverse of what machine actions (as opposed to operator actions) are, simply because they negate action, if only temporarily." (13) I've always understood the purpose of the pause, but after learning a more-in depth relationship between man and machine from gaming I think that Galloway's interpretation is very well thought out.
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