interactivity thoughts
i guess my feeling abt interactivity in videogames is that it's "greedy".. there are lots of formats which bounce two separate modes against each other to see what happens, music and speech, image and text. and sometimes one of those modes can be greedy in the sense of seeming to lay claim too immediately to the generated meaning - like the way we can resent the little texts that accompany paintings for how they can seem to harbour a secret desire to stand in for the art object itself. but even then there's a sense that the claim on our attention helps to emphasise what's silent or resistant in the form accompanying it. and language is a moving thing anyway, needs to start somewhere and go somewhere, is always throwing in nouns, names, places, little scraps of experience or idea... which can make it very productive to bounce things off, since you're never sure where they might end up.
interactivity on the other hand can feel both greedy - hoovering up sound, text, image into mere attributes of itself, second-order signals - and oddly inert: it doesn't seem to want to do anything with these things, to play to their qualities or go anywhere else. interactivity seems to just want to keep on being itself - always varying and permuting, but in some way always speaking to the same form of attention. we get drawn in, keep up with it for a while, fall off or lose pace, and find ourselves exactly where we were when we came in: the game doesn't seem to notice that we're gone.
we don't need to moralise this necessarily since i think this emptiness itself can be useful, for the forms that it picks clean - i preferred videogame sprites and areas as a kid to those in eg saturday morning cartoons specifically because the former were comparatively so bare and less immediate. disembodied blocks and animal critters live on in the imagination as toylike construction tools once they've had their autonomy as images stripped off by the game machine. it does interesting things to text, to space. but i do think that past a certain point of sophistication vgames always seem to get stuck on a sense of their own emptiness, driven to ward it off thru convoluted metafictional conceit or to "solve" it by chasing some chimera of meaningful play. sometimes i feel it's best to just keep your own distance in return: to treat it like standing at the edge of deep cave, where it's OK that it doesn't lead anywhere important, because you're just listening for the echo.
