yeah tbh I don't honestly think that playing a game is more solipsistic than reading a book? both are (can be) engaging quietly by yourself with the creation of another mind or minds.
But you read a book and the words are the same - however you might interpret them or be affected by them - for anyone else who reads it. Same with a play or a film. But a game is influenced by your input and has a massive number of outcomes. And so is both more solispsistic and less shareable.
I mean... you go to see a play on a different night and the experience is different. you wander through a piece of interesting architecture and the experience is different one moment to the next. games aren't infinitely expandable, there's a possibility space.
just been to the David Hockney retrospective in Paris. there's an artist who would tend to disagree that even one person looking at the same painting at two adjacent moments is having the same experience each time.
we can discuss games just fine, they're not unique to each person.
not to mention all of the different actors playing great roles, all of the different performers playing great pieces of music, anything that is live is unrepeatable. that doesn't make it solipsistic, that makes it speak to the nature of being human in time.
Hisham Matar's "My Friends" is a fantastic novel and, according to the author, in part an attempt to reconcile himself with the fact that he can be standing beside his wife or an incredibly dear friend looking at a painting and not know what is inside their head.
I don't disagree with those points, but when you are talking about varying live performance, you're also inevitably describing experiences shared with other members of an audience, in the same room or space, while with very few exceptions, gaming is either solitary, with one other or online.
Isn’t this all Bergson? The place/design can be identical but the experience changes because humans exist in their own continuous lifetime/durée not in the specific location.
Hockney's late work is really grappling with this, he's been pushing at the edges of it all his life. He mounted 18 cameras on one side of a car and drove slowly through the English countryside; then you can watch the 18 different perspectives on one drive, on 18 screens on the wall.
it's mesmerising. looking through multiple eyes at the same time. things that just vanish between one 'glance' and the next because the leaf fell/the insect flew/the wind blew that branch over this one.
if anything I think it’s complicated by your active involvement, because innovation in storytelling/graphics always has to be balanced with the need to give the player something to do, and often the thing you’re given to do will be thrilling but relatively banal (kill stuff; do quests)…
…whereas in theatre/TV/sport etc you’re largely exonerated from any responsibility beyond sitting there. So I think in writing about games a non gamer who might be impressed with a description of the themes or story might not be interested in hearing about boss fights
There’s something to this, I think; the games that seep into mainstream discourse have a narrative similarity to an older medium. Eg it’s a lot easier to evoke the cut scenes of TLOA than the experience of the Radahn Festival…
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we can discuss games just fine, they're not unique to each person.