An Introduction to Donkeyspace

What is this substack about?

Giovanni Pintori, Poster for Olivetti

It’s a new year. Let’s pretend we’re starting over. I’ll go first.

Games

Donkeyspace is mostly about games. I am a game designer by trade. I think about games a lot. Despite being ubiquitous and a massive pop culture industry, I think games remain under-theorized. I want to contribute to the project of understanding games better, appreciating and critiquing them more deeply, and discovering the most interesting and useful perspectives that games can give us about the world.

When I say “games” I’m talking about the broadest possible version of that category. I’m especially interested in video games, that’s how I make my living, and just… look at them, how could you not be interested in them? Even if you don’t like them, even if they’re not “your thing”, like, what the hell are they? It’s fascinating! But I think the best way of understanding video games is seeing them in the larger context of games in general, the games that humanity has played since the dawn of history — board games, card games, sports, gambling games, party games, game shows, the games you play with babies, the games mathematicians and economists and philosophers use as theoretical concepts, the games animals play.

For me, the most interesting things about video games can also be found in these other games: rules and play, reduction and emergence, precision and ambiguity, causality and randomness, problem-creation and solution-finding, imagination and truth, attention and oblivion, systems and… whatever it is that systems aren’t.

Art

For me, the skeleton key that ties all of these things together is the idea that games are an artform. Try not to be distracted and confused by the lofty connotations of the word “art”; don’t picture expensive pictures in gilt frames hanging in a fancy museum. I’m talking about art as a category in the broadest sense — music, dance, literature, that kind of thing — the domain of certain kinds of pleasure, which can range from primal and visceral to complicated and intellectual; and certain kinds of meaning, which can range from simple and straightforward to elaborate and circuitous. But the main idea is that these are activities where we accept a certain amount of weirdness, don’t demand that everything cash out in some easily-explained value or utility, and allow for, even expect, a certain kind of mysterious irreducibility.

The arts live alongside STEM fields and have a complementary, if sometimes contentious, relationship with them. One of the most interesting and potentially confusing things about games is that they are an art form with a lot of STEMmy qualities, and game creators and players tend to have a lot of STEMmy personality traits. This curious mix of art’s dreamy pretension and STEM’s stubborn literal-mindedness makes games, in my view, especially relevant to our particular moment in history.

Understanding that games, all games, are, at root, a kind of artistic experience, helps us understand what’s going on with them. It also suggests that the conversations we should expect to have about them will include things like:

• Taste and aesthetic judgment. (It’s especially hard to have these kinds of conversations about games because they are an artform where an individual “work” can sometimes be an entire life-consuming hobby unto itself).

• Craft. (The formal qualities of games involve the technical details of some of the most intricate and complicated cultural objects ever devised).

• Identity. (Both the shared identities we forge through our collective love of popular games like Football and Wordle, and the subcultural identities we construct through expertise in esoteric genres that require a high degree of insider literacy).

• History. (The complex network of influence, evolution, and provenance that help us ground artworks in the world).

• Ideas. (The big, implicit “folk” ideas that we aren’t consciously aware of, that are revealed through the games we make and play; the explicitly “authored” ideas that are deliberately expressed through games as a creative medium; and everything in between).

• Ethics and Morality. (Both as a feature of the way we understand and interpret the ideas we discover and communicate through games, and as a feature of how we think of games overall, how they fit into our lives, how they contribute to the big project of figuring out who we are and where we are going).

Philosophy

Who are we? Where are we going? When I started this substack a few years ago I was deep in the throes of AI fever. That fever has broken a bit, but I still think something incredibly strange and important is happening. I still think that it is crucial we get some things right about the present moment, and I still think that games have something valuable to contribute to this goal.

The first games we have historical records of were about fate, virtue, gods, and luck. Games have always been a way of reflecting on big ideas, serving as metaphors, models, and laboratories. Entire fields of intellectual inquiry (probability theory and game theory) have emerged from the study of games.

We should expect more from games, and from our study of games. We live in a world half-devoured by software; a world struggling to transition out of antique systems of superstition and tradition into new forms of organizations that are, as of yet, unfinished, uncertain, and highly contested; a world poised on the precipice of unimaginable problem-solving power, and all of the new problems that will create. We should expect games, the artform of systems, the shadow companion of science, technology, engineering, and math, to be a source of valuable insights and ideas. That’s the project I want to contribute to with Donkeyspace.

An Invitation

I’m interested to hear from you. Feel free to reach out with feedback, suggestions, and questions. Thanks for reading!