In this week’s reading, Sicart talked a lot about design. Not just ‘game design’, which he thinks is not a broad enough term, but of the field of design in general. ‘Game design’ and the greater architects of play do many of the same things that, say, product designers do.
One thing designers have to keep in mind is the concept of “affordances”. Affordance is basically the idea that certain shapes in design imply certain actions, or “afford” them. A door handle “affords” opening a door. Handles on a teapot afford pouring. The top lid of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System is curved as to afford you putting a game in (and to prevent you from putting on drinks that will spill and break it). Similarly, games have affordances. A platform affords you jumping onto it. Coins in the game world afford collecting them. In this way, game design is much like product design, although Sicart thinks that it goes much beyond this.
I really like the way Sicart talks about how “programming a computer is making it play”. This reinforces the idea that play is a method of personal expression. I am thoroughly convinced that a well-written computer program can be art, like poetry (not necessarily what it does, like the game it makes being art, but the written code itself). If the debate over whether “games are art” is thorny, then this one is a thornbush. Nonetheless, I think it’s very important to emphasize the personal nature of programming, of creating things on the computer. One of the reasons I am very doubtful of people who talk about ‘the singularity’, and ‘sentient AI’, that some futurists talk about, is that the machine is nothing without the human behind it. It only knows to do what we have told it to, and much as things seem to have changed, in reality this paradigm hasn’t changed over the years. I think people forget this because they do not understand computers. It seems like a black box, something magical almost. But to those of us who even have basic knowledge of programming, who know how to harness the machine to make it do what we tell it to, we can understand better how computing is an extension of how we play.