About Procedurality
Here we go again
A few years back, I wrote a thing. My intention in writing that thing was to pick up a fight. Or, better, I wanted to get in trouble. I was once told that the second you are given tenure, or the tenous equivalent we have in Denmark, we should write the things that we couldn’t afford to write earlier. I took that advice quite literally and wrote Against Procedurality.
I mostly stand by the arguments I proposed in that text. I could have been a more generous reader of others’ works, but I like my central claim that play matters when discussing games. The game studies world was different then. We were still at the tail end of a war that never existed and quickly moving towards a field in which some junior scholars had a degree in game studies, something unthinkable when I started in the field.
Against Procedurality stroke a chord for two reasons. First, I believe that somehow, game studies got stuck in the idea that it has to be a contentious field. Therefore, the timing of my article allowed for a new conflict, a new line in the sand, after the Ludology vs. Narratology “debate.” Second, I think the study of play, and play studies, saw a revival in the early 2010s, probably as a reaction to formalisms taking over the understanding of what games did.
Let me digress for a second: I have a back-of-the-envelope theory explaining the rise of play in game studies at that time. This theory has two premises. The academic premise is that play allowed a way to combine multidisciplinary approaches within the humanities and social sciences, getting people to talk across departments and eventually overriding a certain atomization of disciplines. The social/political premise is that the 2000s sucked. They were a scared and hedonist decade that witnessed the end of many worlds, from the early online ones to the pre-smartphone IRL world. It was the birth of a fully digital, interconnected world. All of that happened during illegal wars in the Middle East, terrorist attacks in Europe, and expansionist exploitations in the Global South. The 2000s sucked. It was like the 80s but fueled by both greed and paranoia. We ended the decade destroying the economy and the future of generations that will never own property or live better than their parents. We did well in the 2000s.
Play gave a way out of that paranoia. What if we played? What if we took things less seriously, even the serious ones? I think that’s why play and playfulness became more popular in the early 2010s—we were all tired of being scared and paranoid and needed a way out. So, we gave cultural and social value to play. Maybe hope is too big a word, but when the boat is sinking, we want to dance to the tune of the orchestra and enjoy it while it lasts. A part of me also thinks that we started thinking about play because play allows us to think and create new worlds that don’t need to be like the one we live in. So it’s not an indulgent escape but a life-affirming move. A willing negation of the world of the 2000s and a hope for a better world (have we succeeded? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
Anyhow, I got carried away. I am writing this à la diable, so excuse my ramblings. Let’s go back to Against Procedurality. Why am I writing about it again now? Isn’t it irrelevant as an argument? As it turns out, it’s essential to think about procedurality when explaining the roguelike as a poetic form. Because roguelikes are deeply systemic games, or system-dependent playthings. Not only are they defined as poetic forms by their use of procedural content generation, but they are also often collections of systems stacked upon each other, reacting to player input in emergent ways. The pleasure of roguelikes depends on the pleasures of their systems. We cannot understand roguelikes without procedurality. So maybe it’s time to talk about procedurality.
I’m already 600+ words into this reflection, so I’ll try to be brief. A roguelike is a great lens to understand procedural poetics. I am still uncomfortable with the idea of procedural rhetoric, which I think was a productive but misguided idea of a time in which the dream of many of us in game studies was to have games at the New York Times (the dream now would be to have journalism in the New York Times, among all the games). But I can live with procedural poetics: after all, there are very good arguments as to why games and game-adjacent software are aesthetic experiences, so why not think about how these experiences are crafted by using form?
But here’s the catch: I can’t say that roguelikes are a poetic form of procedurality or use of procedurality for poetic effects and write a full stop after that. This would lead me to suggest that the aesthetic experience is contained in the procedural systems of the game. And while those systems play a role in that experience, they are only half of the argument. What is missing is, of course, that these are procedural systems made to be played with. Not to be fed with input so we can get an output. These are games, playthings that require us to be curious, to want to break them, not to trust them but to take them deadly seriously. Only when we play with these systems they yield their secrets, and we have fun.
The fun, meaning, and aesthetics of roguelikes are not defined by procedural systems that react to each other, define and bind our agency, and give us purpose. The procedural aesthetic of roguelikes makes all these systems easy to play with. To not take them seriously. To own, appropriate, and do what they want with them.
There is a procedurality of meaning and a procedurality of joy, and roguelikes are the prime example of the latter.
So, this aesthetics is not confined to how the systems act on us or with each other, nor is it situated in our agency as playful clowns. It’s something else, closer to a conversation or dance aesthetics, a back-and-forth of joyfully shaping each other because it is fun.
(to be continued)