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.