Hundred Thousand Billion Fingers
Metadata
Highlights
- This serial theory of social networks argues that urban and industrial life simultaneously isolates individual actors and arranges them into repetitive structures. The act of reading the newspaper while waiting for the bus was Sartre’s principal example. In his Critique, Sartre paints a portrait of the man in the gray flannel suit who waits for the bus every day with his fellow commuters. “Their acts of waiting are not a communal fact,” Sartre (2004, 262) insists, “but are lived separately as identical instances of the same act.” (View Highlight)
- The sudden realization that one’s circumstances are part of an ineffable network in which countless others participate disrupts the serialized isolation on which games like Super Mario Bros. depend for their escapist pleasures.[9] From the minor jolt of arriving at a party to find another guest wearing the same dress to the major shock of the Pacific Trash Vortex, these moments of recognition provide networked antidotes to serial stupor.[10] (View Highlight)
- In Mega Man 2 there is no record of the twists and turns the player took to get there. Instead, the save state or password is a generality, standing in as a placeholder for the totality of all actual and possible plays that led up to a particular point (View Highlight)
- Here Mario is no longer just a videogame, but a medium for making metagames. (View Highlight)
- The seriality of a player’s performance, both imaginary and actual, has also been incorporated into new forms of gameplay that posit button presses as probabilities within a much larger set of aggregate actions. For example, an emerging genre of self-cooperative gameplay involves recording a player’s actions for a limited time and then simulates a multiplayer environment by replaying the combined actions of a limited number of previous playthroughs. These multiple recordings—or past lives—do not function simply as ghosts visualizing past plays but perform realtime actions necessary for further exploration of the game (e.g., holding a door open for future navigation). (View Highlight)
- The following chapter tracks this behavior in the context of the modding communities and pro gamers that made Defense of the Ancients (2003–) and Valve, a company that extends these forms of incorporation by building a business plan based on colonizing (rather than policing) the metagame. Whereas Nintendo has been reluctant to expand its platform into online marketplaces, downloadable content, cosmetic markets, competitive gaming, live streaming, and modding, Valve has embraced this as their core game design (and managerial) philosophy. And while the time represented by videogames as the ideological avatar of play is often coded as off the clock, outside of work, or a waste of time, suddenly all that time spent playing serial games like Super Mario Bros. does not seem nearly as ineffable. A hundred thousand billion fingers, and a hundred thousand billion years of working with our hands, have ultimately emerged as a valuable commodity as play becomes a form of production. (View Highlight)
Hundred Thousand Billion Fingers
Metadata
Highlights
- This serial theory of social networks argues that urban and industrial life simultaneously isolates individual actors and arranges them into repetitive structures. The act of reading the newspaper while waiting for the bus was Sartre’s principal example. In his Critique, Sartre paints a portrait of the man in the gray flannel suit who waits for the bus every day with his fellow commuters. “Their acts of waiting are not a communal fact,” Sartre (2004, 262) insists, “but are lived separately as identical instances of the same act.” (View Highlight)
- The sudden realization that one’s circumstances are part of an ineffable network in which countless others participate disrupts the serialized isolation on which games like Super Mario Bros. depend for their escapist pleasures.[9] From the minor jolt of arriving at a party to find another guest wearing the same dress to the major shock of the Pacific Trash Vortex, these moments of recognition provide networked antidotes to serial stupor.[10] (View Highlight)
- In Mega Man 2 there is no record of the twists and turns the player took to get there. Instead, the save state or password is a generality, standing in as a placeholder for the totality of all actual and possible plays that led up to a particular point (View Highlight)
- Here Mario is no longer just a videogame, but a medium for making metagames. (View Highlight)
- The seriality of a player’s performance, both imaginary and actual, has also been incorporated into new forms of gameplay that posit button presses as probabilities within a much larger set of aggregate actions. For example, an emerging genre of self-cooperative gameplay involves recording a player’s actions for a limited time and then simulates a multiplayer environment by replaying the combined actions of a limited number of previous playthroughs. These multiple recordings—or past lives—do not function simply as ghosts visualizing past plays but perform realtime actions necessary for further exploration of the game (e.g., holding a door open for future navigation). (View Highlight)
- The following chapter tracks this behavior in the context of the modding communities and pro gamers that made Defense of the Ancients (2003–) and Valve, a company that extends these forms of incorporation by building a business plan based on colonizing (rather than policing) the metagame. Whereas Nintendo has been reluctant to expand its platform into online marketplaces, downloadable content, cosmetic markets, competitive gaming, live streaming, and modding, Valve has embraced this as their core game design (and managerial) philosophy. And while the time represented by videogames as the ideological avatar of play is often coded as off the clock, outside of work, or a waste of time, suddenly all that time spent playing serial games like Super Mario Bros. does not seem nearly as ineffable. A hundred thousand billion fingers, and a hundred thousand billion years of working with our hands, have ultimately emerged as a valuable commodity as play becomes a form of production. (View Highlight)