fusangite said:
No. Going to the movies for a date is not not about going to the movies it's just also, more importantly, about going on the date. Things can be "about" more than one thing at a time. Gaming is always about gaming; it's just also about other things too most of the time.
I'm going to disagree with you here and say that yes, while the aboutness of things can certainly be multidirectional, no, it doesn't
have to be. A good example would be certain kinds of allegory. Now, if you want to say that I'm wrong, that I'm not gaming without my gaming being about gaming, that in fact I'm simply not gaming at all, or that I'm gaming
incorrectly, then you can keep on trucking with that one. I happen to believe that on the one hand there's a concept in our culture, "going to the movies," and then there's an actual practice where I go to a movie, and in my case there's no requirement that the two should overlap.
fusangite said:
That's just not true. How can the word "gaming" have any meaning if it can potentially refer to anything and everything in in the entire world?
Philosophically speaking, the word gaming can already do that. We've been talking about language games, the construction of social reality and the concept of play for half a century. And none of this is that chaotic evil continental philosophy you and Akrasia seem to despise so much; it's all of the upstanding analytic variety (which doesn't mean it's not poststructuralist, since most analytic philosophy is).
fusangite said:
The moment you bound/define gaming, you introduce the possibility that people will do it wrong. Take "walking" for instance. If I drag myself somewhere with my lips, I'm walking wrong.
No, you just aren't walking. The idea that you're walking wrong here is absurd. Do snakes walk, but just do it wrong?
Look at it this way: in order to say that someone is doing something wrong, you have already to have a set of beliefs about a number of things. The most important of these is that you have to believe that they're trying to do right what you believe they're doing wrong in the first place, i.e. you have to believe that they're trying to walk by dragging themselves somewhere with their lips. If they're just in a "drag yourself somewhere with your lips" race, they can't be walking wrong; in fact if they were walking as you or I do in that same "drag yourself somewhere with your lips" race, they'd be doing
that wrong. Here the wrongness is determined by the immediate context of the race and its participants, and not by any transhistorical notion of "drag yourself somewhere with your lips" wrongness.
But, you might say, it would always be wrong to walk as you or I do in a "drag yourself somewhere with your lips" race, and that might be true, because that's already a very specific practice we've laid out, and it's difficult to break it down further into subsets of practices that might emerge and transform the sport of "drag yourself somewhere with your lips." I maintain, however, that it's still possible for this sport to change drastically through technological advances, cultural shifts, even through reassessments of what is significant in the sport--perhaps to the point where walking is no longer wrong when running a "drag yourself somewhere with your lips" race. I want to go on with this quite a bit further but I'm starving, so I'm going to finish this off and grab some food.
First let's take a quick moment to think about how we might try and define gaming here. I think this is where eyebeams has a lot to say that some other people just aren't registering. On the one hand, you can try and come up with your totalizing definition of what gaming is right now, today, and then flip it from a description of current gaming practices to a prescription for all "correct" gaming practices forever. On the other hand you can--and this seems to be eyebeams' big issue with The Forge, because they don't do this, don't even seem to grasp why it might be important--take a step back from this totalizing, culturally isolated concept of "gaming" and look at the larger socio-political factors that are responsible for producing such concepts.
How does anyone fail to see that the latter simply makes more sense? If you'd defined gaming by what everyone was doing in 1970, then we'd
all be gaming wrong today. So why, exactly, should today be the standard for tomorrow? And, to take this a step further, why shouldn't designers like eyebeams attempt to anticipate these shifts in how gamers go about doing their thing, or why shouldn't he attempt to develop games that even encourage certain shifts in gaming, based on his understanding of current and developing social contexts? Why shouldn't he, in other words, try and design the next Vampire:tM
on purpose, try and capture the disillusionment of a generation, or anything to that effect?
fusangite said:
Glad you have come up with conditions under which I can be wrong. Clearly, then, the word "define" has parameters; why doesn't the word "gaming"?
If you couldn't tell, I was parroting your statement back at you. Still, you or me saying "you're wrong," and saying "Jimmy over there is gaming wrong," are two completely different things. While it may seem like an insane conceptual leap, even the idea of defining something can and has changed over time, can and will continue to change over time. Anyhow, tuna!