On the Black Box

I wanted to write a bit about the Black Box. The Black Box is a term used in the "Science Studies" that refers to an area that, because of its success, we don't ever think about; that is, until it breaks down. I wanted to think about Video Games using this term. It may end up that I am forcing this term on the game, but I think that it has enough familiarity to lend itself to discussion. Black Box is defined as (and this is how it changed into the Sociological term):

“...used by cyberneticians whenever a poece of machnery or a set of commands is too complex. It its place they draw a little black box about which they need to know nothing but its input and output.” (Latour: Science in Action: 3)

“The assembly of disorderly and unreliable allies is thus slowly turned into something that closely resembles an organised whole. When such a cohesion is obtained we at last have a black box.” (Latour: Science in Action:131)

The Black Box is interesting because of how it came to be. "The assembly of disorderly and unreliable allies..." is referring to each individual part that makes a thing. In a computer, or in a video game console, these allies can be processors, fans, anything that makes the machine go. Each individual part is assembled and looked on by experts. Those putting the machines together might not know how each part works individually, but they've put together a series of allies in order to create a whole that is used as a vessel for the games it plays.

Each generation's console puts the latest innovations in chipset / graphic processing into their machines. The conglomeration of allies that they use, even though they are hardware, determine the software that the console manufacturer must use in order to use the hardware as it is intended (if this is wrong, please tell me where I went astray). This basic "how-to", ever since the PS1, has been part of an ongoing issue.

Each dev kit is not radically different but is different enough that copatibility issues with past games are proving to be more and more difficult to maintain. Each generation, the Black Box of the newest console is opened and while exploration is fast and furious, the development kit of each of the generation's consoles are not fully realized until just before the console is ready to be replaced with a newest black box. Constant redesign in order to use the newest available hardware constantly force developers to rework the way they understand how to design games.

This ties into a recent discussion of the idea of the word design. From here:

“I would argue that design is one the terms that has replaced the word “revolution”! To say that everything has to be designed and redesigned (including nature), we imply something of the sort: ‘it will neither be revolutionized, nor will it be modernized’. For me, the word design is a little tracer whose expansion could prove the depth to which we have stopped believing that we have been modern.”

There are a lot of things going on in this quote. First, modernity and the ways we believe ourselves to be modern is born out of the idea that we are always progressing and are SO much better than our primitive ancestors. One of my favorite quotes from Georg Simmel is something akin to "Our material culture has inarguably changed over the past 100 years whereas behavior has not". We'll go from here and move into design.

Modernity implies a variety of ideological changes. The definition from wikipedia is:

At its simplest, modernity is a shorthand term for modern society or industrial civilization. Portrayed in more detail, it is associated with (1) a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation by human intervention; (2) a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy; (3) a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy. Largely as a result of these characteristics, modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. It is a society—more technically, a complex of institutions—which unlike any preceding culture lives in the future rather than the past. (Giddens 1998, 94)

The problem with this definition is that most of it is simply our technology. We haven't really changed that much. In this sense, modernity is still processing. This is an important concept when referring to the idea of design.

If Latour is right and design does indeed beg for and is synonymous with "revolution" then this is another mode to point at our still modernizing selves. Games that we play are still being recalibrate and rethought, retooled, and rediscovered. Each console's engine is explored and tooled with but we are still all playing super mario brothers or doom or any of the first games with a new skin. The games that actually move the entirity of the gaming industry forward are as few and far between as truly breathtaking innovations in just about any field in existance.

When game systems become stable, complex, or good enough to not have to be tooled with as an engine, I believe that innovations in game design via narration or impulse of the character will become more important. It is these things that people want to explore in gaming. Each game that is sallied forth by whatever respective camp, has a shallow character given depth by factors the player cannot control. In essence, our character's depth is given a priori but we might not know it until we finish the game.

We have a long way to go before the black box of the console is fully resolved. This black box, this pandora's box, while it has been around for some 30 years, still has a long way to go before the system can settle for new ways of gaming. I believe this is what critics of the idea of "Intelligent Game Discussion" are getting at. The technology we use isn't stable enough to allow for true discussion of what a game is. For all they know, we are all still playing Super Mario Brothers; and I tend to agree with them.