Code, Software and Serious Games

I found this week's reading especially interesting in relation to last week's material, particularly when comparing Fuller's "A Means of Mutation" with Galloway's "Code" and our discussion about executable code and performative language. Whether or not we agree that code is the only language that is executable, one of the most important aspects of code as it is most frequently used is that it is functional - it makes things happen. Yet Fuller argues that the surface aspect of code (i.e. software and browser composition) achieves the exact opposite. He states that commercial software "is continually dragging this space of composition, network, computer, user, software, socius, program production, back into the realm of representation... rather than putting things into play, rather than making something happen" (64, italics mine). In other words, by focusing on graphic representation and the page metaphor, web browsers are typically coded so that nothing happens, even though making things happen seems fundamental to code itself.

Our reading contains a lot of similar paradoxes, and I think it would be interesting to discuss or try to determine where these paradoxes come from and why they exist. For example, Fuller's article "It Looks Like You're Writing a Letter" suggests that as Microsoft Word abounds with more and more tools that seem to give users more options and more ways of styling text and documents, features such as spelling and grammar checks and pre-defined templates constrict the user's scope in terms of document design and use of language. In Word, tools can be used only as the program intends them to be used. Thus, more tools and options do not free the user, but rather increasingly enable him or her to get lost within the menu structure of the program and its hierarchy of applications. Is this a result of Microsoft's commercial nature, economic/historical/cultural factors, user expectations, or even aspects of the code itself? These are questions I hope to be able to at least touch on briefly during our discussions.