My Friend Computer
Metadata
Highlights
- a videogame is an excuse to use the computer. to use a computer is to gain additional sense organs, which also causes the ones you already have to work in a different way. a mouse pointer becomes an extension of your hand, and the eyes adjust to follow it - the cursor does some of the work in making the screen intelligible that the eyes were previously doing, leading to a shift in procedures of visual knowledge. (View Highlight)
- i’ve written before that i started making computer games as something to do while i waited for my limewire downloads to finish. but to be more exact: i partially downloaded things through limewire because it was an excuse to just tinker on a computer. it helped that it was a very computer-y form of tinkering: you typed, played with inscrutable connections, searched, compared, and if you were lucky - bop! you got a song. so it was an activity with a satisfying beginning, middle and end, and a mild sense of accomplishment. and maybe more importantly it was also an experience that could hypothetically be extended and repeated forever. you could compare to children’s toys, which give you a shape with certain affordances that assist with private imaginative rituals but also makes those rituals take on a kind of definite, repeatable quality. and it’s interesting to contrast that with my first impressions of using a computer, which were mainly that it have you a wide and enticing new toolset but nothing to DO. (View Highlight)
- no point to any of this other than to record that, for me at least, the purpose of a computer was less visible than the series of affordances it offered, and the process of slowly assembling those affordances into semi-coherent directed processes - into “using” the computer - was a sort of piecemeal and provisional one, driven maybe less by any specific desire to do a thing than by just slowly building up a picture of what processes led into each other, which formed satisfying loops, could be closed and repeated (View Highlight)
My Friend Computer
Metadata
Highlights
- a videogame is an excuse to use the computer. to use a computer is to gain additional sense organs, which also causes the ones you already have to work in a different way. a mouse pointer becomes an extension of your hand, and the eyes adjust to follow it - the cursor does some of the work in making the screen intelligible that the eyes were previously doing, leading to a shift in procedures of visual knowledge. (View Highlight)
- i’ve written before that i started making computer games as something to do while i waited for my limewire downloads to finish. but to be more exact: i partially downloaded things through limewire because it was an excuse to just tinker on a computer. it helped that it was a very computer-y form of tinkering: you typed, played with inscrutable connections, searched, compared, and if you were lucky - bop! you got a song. so it was an activity with a satisfying beginning, middle and end, and a mild sense of accomplishment. and maybe more importantly it was also an experience that could hypothetically be extended and repeated forever. you could compare to children’s toys, which give you a shape with certain affordances that assist with private imaginative rituals but also makes those rituals take on a kind of definite, repeatable quality. and it’s interesting to contrast that with my first impressions of using a computer, which were mainly that it have you a wide and enticing new toolset but nothing to DO. (View Highlight)
- no point to any of this other than to record that, for me at least, the purpose of a computer was less visible than the series of affordances it offered, and the process of slowly assembling those affordances into semi-coherent directed processes - into “using” the computer - was a sort of piecemeal and provisional one, driven maybe less by any specific desire to do a thing than by just slowly building up a picture of what processes led into each other, which formed satisfying loops, could be closed and repeated (View Highlight)