Intense Processing

Crawford's Process Intensity article brings up an interesting distinction that may have gone un-parsed in class up until now: the distinction between process and datum, or, more generally, between actions and things. The most interesting thing about this distinction is that it allows us to use the vast body of texts dealing with those distinctions on a metaphysical/philosophical level with respect to gaming. As we could see from Galloway, computer gaming has no real physical 'game.' It is always dependent on auxiliaries, intermediaries and the very act of playing a game for a game to emerge from the disparate elements of executed code, twitchy thumbs and eyes glazed-over.

This points to a conclusion: that the subjective experience of playing a video game can be understood as an property emergent from material components, like art or life, whose emergence can not be understood. Crawford's concept of process intensity qualifies the strength of this emergent property, the enjoyability of a game is directly dependent on its own strength of action.

Bogost seems also to be pointing at this kind of analysis of gaming as process, as his concept of procedural rhetoric serves to emphasize the game as action.

Then, with this in mind, we may have new powerful tools in our theoretical arsenal to defend game studies against those who would relegate it to methodological analysis, as Aarseth does. Methodological approaches presuppose that their subject matter is already a 'thing' or a cohesive unified single entity capable of being analyzed like any other 'thing.' However, if what makes a game a game is its process intensity or emergent properties, such an analysis can not assume objective properties in games and thus the entire method of inquiry would be called into question.