Markku Eskelinen and Ragnhild Tronstad, "Video Games and Configurative Performance"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Video games as remediated traditional games
- "Games don't need audiences"
- Distinction between interpretive activity and "real" activity/play (non-trivial effort)
- Ergodic art exists between these two poles
- Pursue theory that fits games better
- Kaprow's Happenings, robotic art on a continuum with games
- Non-trivial work can be a means to produce something to be interpreted, but not in games
- Games are audienceless; games have variable sequences of action; games are a kind of performance/activity
- Eskelinen and Tronstad evidently presume a heirarchical relationship between activity and passivity
- Ludus rules determine win/end-game conditions; paidia rules determine the parameters of play
- Configurative, non-trivial work is a kind of performance
- "Matrixed" performances are separate from the real-world context in which they are performed, "non-matrixed" performances are a part of it
- Material investment breaks down the barrier between games and real life
- Eskelinen and Tronstad "don't expect to see the equivalent of avant-garde artists emerging from the game design community." (Um... yeah, about that...)
- After twenty pages of jargon-laden formalist taxonomies, Eskelinen and Tronstad appeal to a better understanding of the actual relationship between player and game, and the pleasure thereof