I found a PDF of an HTML version online.
Two quotes ripped out of their context in Chris Crawford’s preface to The Art of Computer Game Design:
The computer game is an art form because it presents its audience with fantasy experiences that stimulate emotion.
This more sizable investment of participation yields a commensurately greater return of emotional satisfaction. Indeed, the role of participation is so important that many people derive greater satisfaction from participating in an amateur artistic effort than from observing a professional effort. Hence, games, being intrinsically participatory, present the artist with a fantastic opportunity for reaching people.
- So art creates-evokes-invokes-generates-provokes (not sure which word(s) are most appropriate) an affect
- Return-on-investment language
- Making a rhetorical case for video-games-as-art in 1982
- Flattening of satisfaction
- What if the “satisfaction” of “participating” were categorized as different from “satisfaction” of “observing”
- Is “participation” in a game different from “participation” in an “amateur artistic effort”?
- What even IS “participating in an amateur artistic effort”
- To de-vague “Artist” a bit, does a musician feel listening to music is a lesser experience than making it?
- What even IS “participating in an amateur artistic effort”
- Is this a false binary, following on the “return-on-investment” framing by looking at a finite amount of resource to be put Into the Art-Self
What are the stakes, I guess is a big question to keep in mind.
Anyway I decided to stop taking notes at this point because my skin felt thin and itchy.