----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Hello Empyre, and thank you Alenda for orchestrating this. It's a privilege to be posting here.
Following on Alenda's introduction, I'd like to begin with a few thoughts about videogames as they may be considered through the lenses of performance and materiality. Videogames and other forms of electronic entertainment can do many things. They can represent real world places and systems. They can make claims about things. They can communicate ideas, liberate minds, distract, enlighten, excite, torment, and much much more. These are the kinds of terms—terms that ultimately hinge on the player experience—that those working in the business, at least on the design and software side, prefer to use when they talk about what they do. But what electronic entertainment is also about—and perhaps what it is most fundamentally about--is extraction: resource extraction to construct and power the streams of machines necessary to support an industry built on planned obsolescence and endless growth; and data extraction from players/users, to use in arbitrage schemes and/or to improve the attentional efficacy of the products themselves. These terms are rarely discussed at events like the Game Developers' Conference or the Electronic Entertainment Expo. But what does all this have to do with "green gaming?" 1/4 _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
