A Perfect Circle of Teleology

At the point of the user, there is no fundamental difference between the M16 and the AK47, despite the protestations of those who see them as fetishes of Being. Even moreso than in combat, this is true in video games, where the same entity can be used to create many different supposedly different things in the game world, all fulfilling the same function. Games utilize textures, showing this very function. All static walls are static walls, with only their texturing giving them any sort of relation to the game’s written story at all, fitting into the atmosphere of the scene in which they’re placed. It’s no wonder then, that almost all games which make use of custom mapping or custom content created by players have some sort of “development texture”, such as the orange or grey cubes in the Source engine.

The latest discovery among the various pseudo-academic formalists who’ve taken their disappointing stabs at interpreting video games has been the insight brought about from this realization: that games are games and their narrative works not on their diegetic or cinematic storytelling, but on their mechanical and gameplay elements. The insight is one which is surprisingly difficult, occluding much of games-studies behind cart-before-horse interpretations, focusing on the gameplay as an almost an accidental addition, the text being more or less seen as an incomplete movie. Though the mistake isn’t unique to gaming at all, as it can also be seen in the above-mentioned example of firearms, with strategic and tactical studies often being hindered by the obsessions of so-called historians who treat each battle as though it were a trade show for different kinds of machinery all serving fundamentally identical functions.

In all of this, the emergence of function shows itself as an even more fundamental element of games, where the emergence of function (ie, the creation of a mechanic in regards to its purpose) is the emergence of the complete context of the game, where all various things are bound together by meta-mechanics operating invisibly. As an example, the various cars in Grand Theft Auto all fulfill the same function, being vehicles which the player character enters and then uses to traverse the open map. Behind all of this is a meta-mechanic tying all things together, that of the map, transit, the player, movement, etc. The camera moves behind the player as the player moves through three dimensional geometry, going in a linear order from one coordinate position to the next on the finite grid of the map. The car is a part of this meta-mechanic of movement, where it allows the player to bind their entity with another, an entity solely existing for the purpose of enhancing movement.

These meta-mechanics bind all functions together into a fully enclosed loop of the entire system, that is the final game. The final product of a game is ultimately a machine in this way, a piece of clockwork in which the various functions are subordinate within mechanics, within meta-mechanics, all interlocked to a closed system. The player interacts with the machine always as a watchmaker, manipulating variables of functions, pulling on different strands as it were, to produce various results.