Why I Love My Kenmore Progressive Upright Vacuum Cleaner

My vacuum cleaner is nothing short of amazing. It has an “Inteli-Clean system” that — get this — “detects cleaning needs and adjusts cleaning power.” Basically, it’s a divining rod driven by science that lends dirt finding some much-needed EXCITEMENT.

It’s like this: you’re pushing the vacuum along and it finds something grimy. You can’t see anything on your carpet, but you notice the machine’s constant ****whiRRRrr*** deepen to a lower rumble. What’s more, its headlight dims as if it’s thinking hard about something. A meter near the handle indicates just how much a power is being diverted to suction — one bar of four at present. The thing kicks up to two while you’re watching, and you can feel the engine rev. It hits three bars, and suddenly you know how dirty this spot on the rug is. At four, the motor’s needs practically extinguish the headlight, and the vacuum’s roar is just short of deafening.

Then, it calms down and you keep moving. Push, pull, repeat. All the while hoping to find another feedback-rich nasty patch.

While it’s hard to overstate just how small the reward is, this process does (somehow) make you feel like you’ve accomplished something more significant than simply pushing a vacuum around. Stumbling across those little swatches of grub is like finding gold, man! And for me, it turns the whole chore into something like a game. The simple act takes on brand new significance when given a means of measuring its effectiveness. I wish more of my appliances would do the same.

Actor or Audience Member? Interaction’s Dual Demands

When people learn that I was a film studies major in college, they tend to start asking after favorites. My pat answer is Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. It’s a quiet film, one that maintains some distance between itself and the audience.

The thing I most love about Days of Heaven is that it doesn’t batter your senses about. Rather, it creates a space for you to inhabit. And I’ve noticed that a great deal of the art I most appreciate does much the same. For example, take Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The way the album’s songs devolve into distorted staticky crackles may turn some folks off, but I’d presume that part of the reason they do so is to help sculpt an inhabitable sonic landscape. One that doesn’t push the listener out with an overabundant Wall of Sound.

For me, both these works are like slipping into a hot bath: they engage the senses, but don’t overwhelm. Unfortunately, I’m hard pressed to find a game that strikes a similar balance.

Games, being participatory experiences, demand interaction. They offer a space to inhabit, but it generally isn’t for quiet reflection. Players are both audience members AND protagonists. In fact, playing a video game is a lot like acting in a play you’ve never rehearsed — the big picture is always a step ahead because you never have the chance to determine exactly what’s going down. But does this dual responsibility to simultaneously act and interpret limit gaming’s potential depth?

Furthermore, is there a proven means of critically analyzing games while they’re still being played? If so, fill me in…I’m clueless.

“I Am Jack’s Smirking Revenge”: Games as Expression and Performance

Play. What is it, exactly? Let’s make this an “according to Webster’s”-style moment and find out. 

Oop. I used the über-convenient Dictionary.com instead. They define the word in an astonishing sixty-two different ways sans idioms and verb phrases.

Fourteen of these definitions rely on an understanding of the concept of performance. But not a one even so much as mentions expression, which is defined as an “indication of feeling, spirit” or “character…as on the face, in the voice, or in artistic execution.”

Of Tools and Teapots, Rules and Decoration

My last post suggested that “some of the most exquisitely designed games are…a sort of digital folk art” in that they represent “products of skill and insight rooted in a particular subculture’s social values and traditional practices.” I was reacting to Iroquois Pliskin’s idea that game design is less an art and more a craft than we players sometimes imagine. His was a notion I’d been toying with, but had never quite gotten right. I thought I’d try and add to the conversation, but, after blurting out that little business about digital folk blah, social valyadda, and traditional plastics, I decided I STILL couldn’t reason through it. So I tacked on a dopey elliptical noting that digital folk art/craft barely represents the half of games’ collective potential.

But I left that thought vague and largely incomplete for a reason. This blather was supposed to end my post, after all. At the time I thought I was being evocative, like, Here, chew on this — it’s a lot to take in. Now I realize I was just afraid to say something unpleasant. My closing sentence probably should have read:

Of course, [digital folk art/craft] isn’t ALL [games] are, or all they can be…but, sadly, few of them are much more than that at the moment.

Games Criticism — Versus CluClu Land’s Iroquois Pliskin on Game Design as Craft

From Iroquois Plisken’s “There’s a Thin Line Between Love and Hate” post on his Versus CluClu Land blog:

We’re often tempted to think of game design as an art, but it is more fundamentally a craft: games have to function correctly before they can do anything else. They have to be things we can use without frustration.

In essence, Pliskin is asserting that video game design is a type of visual art evaluated first and foremost on usability. I wholeheartedly agree. And perhaps some of the most exquisitely designed games are, more than that, a sort of digital folk art: they are products of skill and insight rooted in a particular subculture’s social values and traditional practices. 

Of course, that isn’t ALL they are, or all they can be…

Black Box 1: Quotes For the Back of an Alternate Universe’s Metal Gear Solid 4

From Vanzeppelin’s GameStop “DISCUSSION” of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots:

you most have this game in your collection of ps3 haha

Kojima is a genius in video games

Simply the most awesome game I played in my life…all is wonderfull.

Feature list:

super history graphics

online sound

one of the most awesome Sgas

parts very funnys

with blu ray of sony

Games Criticism — Versus CluClu Land’s Iroquois Pliskin on Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

From Iroquois Plisken’s “I Sic Brecht on Arsenal Gear” post on his Versus CluClu Land blog:

On one hand, Metal Gear Solid 2 is an overstuffed spy drama about a solo sneaking mission to foil a terrorist seizure of an offshore oil cleanup facility in the East River. But on the other hand, it is a fable about the the player’s immersion in fictional worlds and her identification with its characters. Raiden, the game’s protagonist, is not a solider. He’s a stand-in for the player. We learn that Raiden’s scored this solo sneaking gig because he has the highest score in a series of “virtual reality” missions designed to recreate the events of the first “Metal Gear Solid” game. In other words, Raiden is just someone who played Metal Gear Solid; those are his sole qualifications. When you play Raiden you are playing yourself.