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In 1987, game designer Chris Crawford introduced the concept of process intensity, "the degree to which a program emphasizes processes instead of data." Process, Crawford explains, involves "algorithms, equations, and branches," while data refers to "tables, images, sounds, and texts." A process-intensive program "spends a lot of time crunching numbers; a data-intensive program spends a lot of time moving bytes around."
For Crawford, process intensity is not only a theoretical frame for understanding the difference between algorithms and information, but also an aesthetic principle. "Processing data is the very essence of what a computer does," contends Crawford, so using it just to store and move data around is a waste. For this reason, Crawford boldly claims that process intensity is "a useful criterion for evaluating the value of a piece of software."
From word processors to video games, works with a higher "crunch per bit ratio" -- that is, the ones that contain more processing than they do data -- are better and more virtuous examples of computational media than those with lower ratios, according to Crawford.
In his article, Crawford cites the famous 1983 laserdisc game Dragon's Lair as an example of low process intensity ("its crunch per bit ratio stank," he deadpans). The game displayed big chunks of animations, performing very little processing on the video data and user input.
Crawford refers to his own game Balance of Power as a contrasting, desirable, high process intensity specimen. The game simulates Cold War geopolitics by algorithmically analyzing data like insurgency, economics, might, and prestige across many nations in relation to user actions like sending aid, escalating conflict, and backing down.
In a book-length manual for the game, Crawford summarizes the four geopolitical processes he hoped the game would emphasize: insurgency, coups d'etat, Finlandization, and crises. Dragon's Lair focuses on one process, timing, and a lot of audiovisual instantial assets, whereas Balance of Power highlights many processes operating independently on abstract data sets.
In his 1984 book The Art of Computer Game Design, Crawford had described the same phemonenon as a dichotomy between instantiality and procedurality. Games are instantial when they rely on prerendered, invariable assets over dynamic processes.
This distinction was somewhat easier to grasp for a working game developer in the early 1980s, when a game might be limited to 4 to 64k in size. Given a choice, filling that space with code instead of data would allow for a larger, denser experience. Such concerns are not really relevant anymore, but the general idea of a relative distribution of processes and assets in a particular work remains a potentially useful perspective on a game's formal construction.
By the mid-2000s process intensity gained renewed attention. Channeling Crawford in a 2006 SIGGRAPH keynote, Greg Costikyan advocated for interactive processes over poly pushing and canned data on the grounds that instantial games were hobbling the medium. Costikyan lamented that "80+ percent of the man-hours (and cost) for a game is in the creation of art assets. ... In other words, we've spent the last three decades focusing on data intensity instead of process intensity."
Indeed, the cost of those man-hours was becoming impractical. Where aesthetic rationales for procedural approaches hadn't made much headway, economic imperatives did. The rising costs of AAA game production catalyzed a new interest in procedural methods in game design, most visibly the procedural authoring and gameplay tools of Will Wright's Spore.
But as Costikyan pointed out, procedural content doesn't necessarily change the process intensity of a game on the gameplay register. Or as the critic Noah Wardrip-Fruin has explained, the central issue is not how much total processing takes place in a computational work, but which works "exhibit a comparative intensity of behavioral processing".
Put differently, process intensity and instantial intensity look different depending on which part of a computational platform one works with. Like 3D game engines, procedural content generation methods just increase the process intensity of an already data intensive design paradigm. Compare computer animated films like Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. Considerable effort goes into animating characters and generating environmental effects through procedural methods, but the end result is instantial rather than procedural: a series of still images meant for anamorphic projection.
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That said, may be interesting to consider the relationship between very small system designs and cloning. A smaller system design is easier to copy, and when it is coupled with a small quantity of instantial assets as well (as is the case with JS Joust), it's even easier to copy. This isn't an ethical observation, but a formal one.
Things get back on track, then, when you correctly point out that Joust actually has high process intensity, and you match my thoughts further when you say it is because of Joust's encouragement of social processing. Wilson should consider distancing his games from Tales of Tales games, because when I read "game designs that smother players and reduce rather than expand their available creativity within a particular work" my mind bolts right to The Path.
The Path is one of the most frustratingly stifling "games" ever, because of the horrible lack of verbs available to player - there's nothing to do but walk, look, and listen. Yume 2kki is a similar game that rises above The Path because it gives the player a wide diversity of verbs to discover and play with - 2kki's core problem is how unlikely any one particular verb is to have an effect on a particular part of the environment - but at least you are allowed to try.
One last thought: I haven't been able to play Proteus yet, but it strikes me as having low process intensity (due to how I account visual processing). A Joust-like high process intensity version might be geocaching.
You might be right that ToT's work doesn't really best match to Wilson's aesthetic of openness, although I think Doug would point to the low goal/negotiable goals in those games as the source of their aesthetic similarities. Some would argue that The Path and Endless Forest offer more creativity by refusing to impose a designer's will on the player. But for my part, I tend to see this purported lack of imposition itself as an imposition.
Also, there's nothing negotiable about the King of the Hill goal of Joust and or the press-a-button goal of BUTTON - what is the negotiable is the means of accomplishing the goal. In The Path, there are a series of places to walk to and then an end place to walk to, and while the outdoor colliders can be triggered in any order, there is no meaning to any particular order. The Path takes away creativity but taking away opportunities. I can have a lot more fun wandering around in Just Cause 2, including in its creepy smoke-monster-infested forest, and any racing, story, exploration, and battle challenges are opportunities, not impositions. What games like the Path might offer is freedom from distraction, that might make certain players more likely to engage in wandering / non-goal-seeking behavior.
As for me, I'd ask this: what does a game designer do when he or she designs? What are the materials he or she works with? Does a game designer design players?
A game designer creates a problem to be overcome/solved.
Game designers (with computers) use an interactive medium.
Game designers do not design players, although they may presuppose the players to create the problem.
I believe these are the answers.
Still no, it influences them. That influence can be a moral and ethical one determined by circumstance. But still no.
I don't think strolling through a museum in the same manner you would thumb through a website shopping for ideas and input and material goods is a game at all. Likewise I don't see a game with a solved riddle, overcome obstacle or solved conflict as interest beholden. So also, things that are trifles, baubles ect. simple sugar distractions are also not games.
There must be conflict to solve, a question asked as a riddle or an obstacle to overcome. And a game without risk involved and signature personal authorship (whether created by collaboration or individual) as to the hedonist player has little or no merit.
Now these ideas may be contrasted as aesthetics vs game operations, but they are from my perspective (so far as I have seen) the critical distinction of games.
So when looking at game design the primary goal should be a special affection and concern with the player.
Likewise the player must also be the primary recipient of the attention of the problem/adversity.
So when looking at the issue of process intensity (in games), without increasing the value of expectation and eventual elation it's a purposeless mechanism, as the player gives it it's meaning being the judge of its import.
Social experimentation, is an unpredictable value. Ultimately the value will be whatever the players add to it.
How would you consider Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) being classified in this spectrum? ARGs have high social experimentation with players chasing phone booths (in games such as I Love Bees) and running around, but the ultimate outcome is fairly linear and determined by the people making the ARG. On a side note, the ARGs are quite content intensive.
(Hughes, 1999, p. 94)
Yet, the essence of a game is rooted in its interactive nature, and there is no game without a player.
(Ermi and Mäyrä 2005)
Games are created through the act of gameplay, which is contingent on player acts.
(Consalvo 2009, p. 408)
Most importantly, a game becomes a game when it is played; until then it is only a set of rules and game props awaiting human engagement.
(Calleja 2011)
If there is an exceptionalist argument to make about games, an argument that justifies that games as aesthetic form are different than others, [it] is that games belong to players - at most, games belong to the designer if she wants to establish a dialogue with the player through the game - but play, the performative, expressive act of engaging with a game, contradicts the very meaning of authorship in games.
(Sicart 2011)
I agree with all of these statements, basically, and find Jesper Juul's argument against them rather weak. It is obviously important to analyze games as designed objects, much like any discussion of architecture should include critique of the plans for the building, but the actual building/game as it is played are much more important in my mind. His idea of zero-player games may actually be exploded by considering the designers of AI to be the players at one step of removal. With a game there is always interaction, though the same obviously applies to a book, movie, sculpture, or painting, although in an extreme case a painter could paint blindfolded and never show his work to anyone, we can discard this case as unworthy of analysis (imo).
Clifton - "but also how much of a game's processes a player will have (be able) to keep track of, analyze, and respond to while playing."
me - " sometimes the player physically/mentally does not have the resources to interact with the system in a deeper way."
Clifton your argument here fits into my comment above, with the change I suggest in parenthesis.