Viewing for Code

I remember in lab before break as I watched others play Journey that I was as drawn to thinking about the little flecks of sand the character flicked up when it ran across the desert. It was a cool little effect, one that I probably would have registered at some barely-above-conscious level for a split second before it became a mundane, not-notable, even trivial detail of gameplay. After having spent the last few weeks trying to get a crude ball to bounce around a screen in pursuit of other balls, my experience with this sand-kicking detail was a bit different.

I watched as the granules flew, and the character forged a path in the sand, a path that slowly dissolved into the smooth surface of the dessert as the character moved on, and I began to think through how such effects would be coded. I began to think of the immense labor involved in just these little details, let alone the massively complex code that undergirds the entirety of the game. While I was taken out of the gameplay a bit with these thoughts of coding, I also had a different, richer kind of experience playing and viewing the game. In a parallel vein, Nathaniel talked about how the experience of gameplay is influenced by hacks that allow for hand gestures, Leap Motion devices, and increasingly sophisticated VR.

I suppose what strikes me most in this brief reflection is how my better, more aware understanding of the labor of code runs parallel with some of the themes we have been reading about this week in terms of the invisibility (or assumedness?) of hardware and the role of labor and materiality in our reception and experience of software. In terms of software, I find myself much, much more aware of the importance of supporting and appreciating the labor of software developers (Journey!). I think the readings this week, as they relate to the substrate of hardware, are helping realize the same for hardware, both as it exists now and was historically developed.