Links, Readings

Dangerous Music

Of the blogs I’ve been following recently my current favorite is Versus Clu Clu Land, written by the mysteriously named Iroquois Pliskin (if you catch the reference you get a good idea of his taste in games). About a week ago Iroquois posted a short piece drawing an analogy between Jazz and video games.

Music has always seemed an appropriate metaphor for games to me, and I think the post does a good job of touching on the interesting design tension inherent between structure and improvisation. Unfortunately it gets caught up in the over-blown ‘narrative versus interactivity’ dichotomy at the end and doesn’t speak to what I think is the more interesting logical conclusion: that playing a game is a form of performance.