Game logic and Navidson/Holloway

[MoleculaRR]

1exist's thread on reading materials for the house and the subsequent discussion over Moby Dick got me thinking about the relationship between Holloway and Navidson as hunters (Holloway hunts with a gun, Navy with a camera; Navy might be equated with Esau (in the inverted interpretation) Both are obsessed with their quest) and I wondered what it is about the space of the house that cries out to be solved.

Both Holloway and Navidson seem to demand that the space make sense, that it have a purpose. Holloway makes sense of it by defeating it, Navy wants to come to the end or the center of it so that is circumscribable. Both of these goals strike as closely related to video game goals. I'm obviously interested in Silent Hill 4 (http://www.houseofleaves.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3234) at the moment, but I think almost any game has this kind of invitation to make sense of its space.

If you think about how each character enters the space of the house and the strategies they use to map it or navigate it, it sound a lot like what game players do as they enter the space of a game. In most games, every space is intentional and every object you find clearly related to completing the game's goals, but not always.

There's an implicit trust, I think, in spaces [actual, visual, or textual] that are disorienting or otherwise inscrutable that there is some kind of plan or intention to that space, some reason for it being there. With House of Leaves' emphasis on this and foregrounding of this relationship with space, it's no surprise that we respond to the textual space in a similar way. With all the codes and layers of signification, we want to make a grand, thorough sense of it (in part, so that it vindicates the time we spend in it). But it invites solving in a way that goes beyond its being simply complex or disorienting. Mazes invite solving, but shopping malls don't even though both are complex, repetitive, disorienting.

Similarly, HoL's "mazelike" or encoded writing invites solving where a badly written technical manual would not. Something about HoL makes us stay with it (admittedly, "we" are not every reader), and I think that something is a respect for the reader. In other words, I think that HoL gives us little hints and easy discoveries to help us toward the harder ones. That links it to games, and I think the existence of this forum demonstrates the appeal of that approach.

[dd]

Um, haven't quite got all this stuff figured out yet in my head, it's going to be in the final chapter of my thesis in about 2 years time, but first of all you should maybe read Richard Matheson's Shrinking Man on the topic of men seeing their suddenly enormous house as a kind of dangerous hunting ground htat needs to be explored. House = final frontier?

Also, you should read Shirely Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle (hell, you should read it anyway, it's great) where the main character, who is not well liked by the people of her village, on her weekly excursions into it to buy food, sees the street as a kind of board game. Differeent stages on the route there and back mark her successes and failures. She divides it up into manageable chunks, into a game, so as to reduce its fearful hold over her. Apparently, 'chunking' is a term used by geographers to describe one mthod of pathfinding among humans.

Also, if you know any books where people use Monopoly or other board game metaphors to describe difficult of scary journeys, I'd be very grateful.

[MoleculaRR]

I can't think of anything where a game metaphor is used as defense, but that sounds like a cool idea--and it makes sense in that a game is a set of rules with (usually) clear goals. So obeying the rules and working toward goals is always a familiar position whereas the "real" world--i.e. menacing streets--is fundamentally alien.

I think it is related to the idea of chunking, too. I know the term from psychology where people put things in groups to aid in memory. For example, American phone numbers are 10 digits, so instead of trying to remember 6155559021, which would be beyond almost everyone's short attention memory, we remember it in chunks: (615) 555-9021 (and no, that's not my real phone number).

Similarly, in web or any other documentation design, you put the information into manageable chunks so the viewer can take it in small pieces. Like a map, or a game, or anything else. For some reason it's always better to use 3, 5, or 7 chunks. It's really interesting because it's very useful but it also gets at the basic act of cognition and epistemology.

I'll keep an eye out for board games.

[pwhite]

...phone numbers...it's always better to use 3, 5, or 7 chunks.

That's the way we do it too (chunking phone numbers in threes and fours), but I've noticed that the French do it in twos: where we'd tend to say 'six-one-five...five-five-five...nine-o-two-one', they would probably say: 'sixty-one, fifty-five, fifty-five, ninety, twenty-one. I don't know why this is exactly: could it be that the mind of the Frenchman is an alien entity that functions in ways incomprehensible to the rational, empirical Anglo-Saxon mind? Or is it just because their area codes are two-digit numbers, so it makes sense to chunk the rest in the same way?

Any French contributers care to comment?

[MoleculaRR]

That's an interesting theory (the one about the 2-digit prefix initiating a pattern of chunking by 2's. I'm not going anywhere near the one about French minds).

So it's like the number tells you how to read it. The two digit prefix sets up a pattern for interpolation or a way of thinking which produces a distinctly different result.

In House of Leaves, then, we are gradually led into its complexity by a steady dissolving of the notion of single authorship. Johnny's introduction frames The Navidson Record pretty much in a standard format, and his first interruption comes at the bottom of a page after Zampano has completed his thought. Of course, Johnny's interruption disrupts Zampano's text because he says he made up the part about the water heater being on the fritz.

This starts to unfold the hierarchy in a pattern of disruption that "spirals" inward toward Chapter IX after which it accelerates in multiple directions. Maybe.

[John B.]

I'm not a game theory guy, so forgive me if some of these comments and questions sound naive (or is "ill-informed" a nicer way to put it?). I have to type my way through this stuff. Also, aside from attempting to play Myst a while back, I have no knowledge of computer games. But even if I get laughed out of the forum, at least I've bumped this very intriguing thread back to the head of the pack.
But a better reason is that, in the course of rereading other threads, especially Molecularr's posts in this page of "the bald gnome Error" (http://www.houseofleaves.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1249&start=75), I got to thinking about the present thread as well, and then wondered about the intersection between HoL's textual games (see also this thread (http://www.houseofleaves.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3137)) and games in general.

Games pose puzzles, but it doesn't follow that games are equivalent to puzzles. That is: puzzles have (usually) one solution arrived at in (usually) one way. A labyrinth is an example of a puzzle (but: see Daedalus). Games, though, have outcomes, objects, that can be achieved in any number of ways within given parameters. I keep thinking about Monopoly (in part because of dd's earlier post here; in part because my older daughter adores playing it) and how, even though in one sense its space doesn't change, the consequences (good or bad) of moving through that space do through combinations of literal luck of the draw, rolls of the dice, and the actions of others as they buy and develop property. All those variables, but still contained within a set of rules that govern individual choices made during the course of the game. My daughter (who is ten, by the way) prefers Monopoly over the game of Life because of all those variables. Life (the game) gives one few options and so soon becomes boring; Monopoly is much more open-ended in terms of how one wins and so plays differently each time.
I personally find HoL hard to think about within the context of games because, though I suspect I've said before that we as readers occupy Johnny's position relative to TNR, that's too simple, really. Johnny didn't find TNR in the shape that we encounter it. For him, the trunk's contents posed a (textual) puzzle of sorts that he assembles (and amends and emends), in so far as he is able, to something like his satisfaction. For good measure, he also includes his mother's letters, some poems, some pictures, etc. The Editors include still other stuff. This assemblage, though, creates a different set of issues for us as readers. For Johnny and the Editors, the basic issues are 1) what to include/exclude; and b) how to organize. For us, the basic issues are 1) why are these things included/excluded; and b) what sense can we make of all this? (which, of course, are equivalent to: "How do we read this thing?")
To sum up: Johnny and the Editors' (sounds like a garage band at a publishing house, no?) collective intention isn't to create a game or a puzzle--and isn't it a basic assumption about either of those that their designs are intentional, deliberate?
Now: as to what MZD's intention is, that's a harder question. Games, no matter the number of variables, usually have clearly-stated outcomes and specific ways of achieving them--unless the object is that of most reading: "understanding." HoL, so far as I can tell (http://www.houseofleaves.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1353), isn't a fully-contained text--and aren't games, no matter how elaborate, still "contained" in some way?
As I reread this, it manages to sound to me both confusing and trite, so I'll conclude by saying that, for me, at some level the comparison between gaming and reading HoL (though NOT reading per se) breaks down . . . but that's because I personally have yet to find any solid, unshifting textual ground of the sort that has to exist in any game before we can "play" it. We have either competing sets of rules for reading HoL, or no established rules at all--which reminds me of something that
The slippage that [John B.] mention[s] does seem to be between their/our expectations of the measurement and what the instruments say, but it is unsettling because the suggestion is either that the world wrong, the House is wrong, or every measuring instrument is wrong. In other words, the 1/4" cannot be "read" consistently within a system of signification, so any reading of it is "mis reading" because reading it as such requires that something (world, House, measurement, eyes) be left out in order for it to be true.

I realize I mean something slightly different by "reading", but I think that difference is what makes this so interesting. That is, it seems like this instance of mis-reading demonstrates that all reading is misreading in that there is always slippage between signified and signifier because of the always imperfect vessel of the sign. (my emphases)

Within games--is this right?--there's never any doubt as to rules, or else you can't play. Or if you don't know the rules, you still have to make some up as you go along (see Johnny's adding "water" to "heater"). So are we, then, still at work determining the ground rules of HoL? Its textual metaphysics? I strongly suspect that we are. If so, okay--I'm in. But it's just odd that, 2 1/2 years after starting the thread "Exactly," I find myself arriving at the very same conclusions I arrived at in that thread . . . and that's (still) okay with me.

[modiFIed]

Fascinating. I believe it was Ezra Pound who described art as "a constant and a variable." In poetry, the constant is the form (such as sonnet) and/or meter (iambic pentameter) and or rhyme, and the variable is the words, syntax, etc.

In music, the constant is the notes; the variable is the arranging and playing of them.

Etc.

That's what this thread brings be back to. The wrestling is with the conflicting ideas/narrations/realities/definitions/chronologies/etc. so manifest in HOL (I won't drag them back out here) and the reader's "quest" for a "solution" to the text.

A game has rules and a desired outcome, as John B. says (the constant); but the play is variable.

In the novel...?? The constant is the text; the variable is the reader's understanding of it and reification of it into an experience, a fictive world. A theory applicable to any other novel, I suppose, but HOL presents a unique problem in that the text itself is variable, at least in its order of presentation and how much of it "lands" on the reader (I would bet many portions are skipped by many readers--especially since the reader is often encouraged to do so, as has been duly noted. Not to mention the choice of whether to flip back to footnote 76, whether one reads the Pelican Poems, if so how many, whether we read secondary material, etc.)

Readers of a novel expect only that one constant--linear text, if not linear experience--which is denied us in HOL. There is no contract between MZD and the reader. It's pay as you go. Perhaps the lack of confidence this engenders in the reader is part of the game. As Pynchon once said (I paraphrase), "Why should I make my novels easy to read?"

If I have different notions on Melville's behemoth than you do, or if I find Vineland plodding but you do not, it's not because we're reading different books. But with HOL? Maybe we are.

I'm saying nothing really new, I suppose, which I hope is not actionable, but Pound's constant/variable idea provides a succinctness to the notion of HOL as departing from known forms that I find satisfying.

(Because I like to make sense of puzzles. But some puzzles have no known solution. Does that make them extremely complex puzzles or mere chaos? Hmmm, that's a puzzler.)

[MoleculaRR]

I believe it was Ezra Pound who described art as "a constant and a variable." In poetry, the constant is the form (such as sonnet) and/or meter (iambic pentameter) and or rhyme, and the variable is the words, syntax, etc. In music, the constant is the notes; the variable is the arranging and playing of them.

Really interesting connection here. Nicely tied in, and it brings me back to the issues that John B. is raising. I think this "constant and variable" is a good way to link game play/narrative to other kinds of narration, and I tried to do so in my thesis by talking about game music in those terms. Basically, one of points was that in games that operate on some kind of exploration (that is, games that encourage a one-to-one identification with the avatar as an independent ontology in an emulated world-space) use music to alert readers to two basic states: safety and danger. So either everything's pretty much okay, or there's something we have to do. The musical shift is a sort pavlovian cue to pay attention at the same time that it mimics in miniature the broad trajectory of film music building to a dramatic climax (I could go on and on). The point is that this is a non-puzzle way of talking about games, but still operates within a rigid framework with agreed-upon goals.

What's really interesting is when games break the rules, or appear to. Eternal Darkness does this well, as does Silent Hill 4 (there are probably lots more but that's all I can think of). In those cases, the game's "rule-breaking" involves breaking norms player-to-screen relationships and also game "boss" behavior. What happens is frustrating, but it isn't simply an invalidation of the game experience. It simply shifts the play into the normal territory of the "constant."

I think this is what HoL is doing since, for all its weirdness, it's a really good read. Deciding to skip over parts of it and come back to them in different orders is part of the process that amounts to play. The reading is still "linear" in the sense that sentences read left to right (whatever "left "and "right" mean in relation to the overall book), even if that linearity is performative. So I think I'm disagreeing with you, modiFied, but I'm hesitant because it seems my only way out is to propose to types of reading--a mechanical left-to-right or an overall "Oh, I get it"--and I'm not comfortable making that separation at this point. So, I don't know.

So back to your point, John B., games aren't necessarily puzzles, but they are other things that are, I think, ontologically simlar to HoL. Games can be exploration, conflict, resource management, simulation, but they are always at least ostensibly about restoring order to the world. Some games never allow that resolution (Space Invaders, for example, is "unwinnable" in its original forms), but the structure of solving any sort of problem is consistent with most narratologists' assessment of stories, myths, dreams, and, maybe, games. I'm starting to think that adding "postmodern novels" to that list waters it down even further, so maybe I'm backing off of my original conjecture. If games or narratology become categories which contain everything, they cease to be categories.

Anyway, thanks for bringing this back up.

[pwhite]

EDIT: Molecularr, I'm not ignoring you, I just posted this before reading yours

This is all very interesting to me. What strikes me is that the notion of the game as a rule-based operation with a certain set of invariable parameters does not fit very well with notions of the literary ‘game’: in fact it’s diametrically opposed to it. ‘Ludic’ literature, which has a long history stretching back at least as far as the Alexandrian period, has always been about self-consciously and spectacularly violating rules. So the Ezra Pound ‘constant-variable’ thing modiFIed talks about is not applicable to any ludic literature, the whole point of which is to overturn the ‘constant-variable’ ontology. For example, acrostic poetry, which as far as I know has its origins in the fixed forms of medieval poetry, violates the ‘constant’ and leaves the ‘variable’ intact and unvaried. By this I mean that the content of the poem itself is likely to be entirely conventional and derivative and the form of the poem has suddenly become the thing that potentially ‘varies’. You’re expecting to read a ballad or a rondeau, very fixed, specific poetic forms, and you find yourself reading something else entirely. Of course, this only remains a violation of the ‘rules’ until it becomes the accepted way of doing things, at which point literature moves on and the avant-garde starts messing with new things.

Another point about the ludic mode (which perhaps contradicts what I’ve just said) is that it is…for want of a better word…smug. It is by definition elitist. As soon as you decide to violate a certain set of conventions and do something new, you’re essentially challenging your readership, defying them to join your exclusive club of those that ‘get it’. Once you establish a certain community of readers that ‘get it’, you can draw up your own club rules and constitution. Et voilà: that ludic spirit of exuberance is recuperated by the system; what was at first a transgression becomes just another boring game, with an internationally-agreed set of rules (like capitalism).

But there remains a fascination with the literary game: and the royal road to the ludic mode is allusion. Allusion does not function according to any set of rules (despite attempts to codify it dating back to Quintilian). In fact, the word itself is somewhat elusive: the allusio as a poetic form in humanist literature is not what we would understand by ‘allusion’: it is a game with names, fanciful etymologies. Allusions are always expansive, exuberant: they break their wordly bonds. It seems to me that the literary game is not a kind of game, it’s a kind (maybe the kind) of literature.

[modiFIed]

‘Ludic’ literature, which has a long history stretching back at least as far as the Alexandrian period, has always been about self-consciously and spectacularly violating rules. So the Ezra Pound ‘constant-variable’ thing modiFIed talks about is not applicable to any ludic literature, the whole point of which is to overturn the ‘constant-variable’ ontology.


Perhaps objectifying the mere chaos I alluded to?

Still, when you set out to destroy the temple, you invariably end up creating something--in this case, rubble.

How far afield of convention can one go without creating either chaos or a new convention? Even flouting of conventions involves our constant (the convention) and our variable (the manner in which it is flouted).

acrostic poetry, which as far as I know has its origins in the fixed forms of medieval poetry, violates the ‘constant’ and leaves the ‘variable’ intact and unvaried. By this I mean that the content of the poem itself is likely to be entirely conventional and derivative and the form of the poem has suddenly become the thing that potentially ‘varies’.

Yikes - free verse! I thought Walt Whitman invented it. Live and learn.

Those are fantastic historical notes, though, Mr. White. I've learned something valuable today, which is not every day. First thing I get to the library, I'm running a search on acrostic poetry.

In any event, and for general purposes, I do not contend that Pound was "right," just that he presented an interesting view on art, one of many, and one which has a natural correlary to many of our recognized artistic triumphs.

I always say, beware the conflation of single ideas to encompass all thought. A Grand Unified Theory does not and will not exist. And yes, clarify the difference between theory and practice. It is all too real.

I would clarify also that I remain convinced all generalizations are false--especially this one. (And after all, Pound ended up a crrrrazy fascist.) A confirmed philosophical bachelor, I refuse to wed the ideas I espouse.

PS - speaking of form, has anyone picked up Richard Wilbur's new collected poems. I'm drooling.

[John B.]

One more inane question for Molecularr et al.:

You mentioned that early versions of Space Invaders were "unwinnable." And that allows me to ask about The Sims, which my daughter also loves and which I had wanted to mention in my earlier post. My wife also likes The Sims, and I asked her if it has any "object." "It doesn't have one." "So--nobody 'wins' in the traditional sense? The game has no traditional 'end'?" "Well: your Sim can die; bad things can happen; but, no."

So--given what you were saying about those games that "break the rules," how does The Sims fit into this discussion? It doesn't seem to have any puzzles to solve or rules to follow--just, like, y'know, guiding principles to be alert to (or not). Player as God (or at least minor deity, since the game's makers have determined the interface by means of which the player creates and interacts with the characters), perhaps, since the player's turn ends only when the player wants it to end?

Player as Author.

[Agrimorfee]

A couple pennies from a long-time lurker--

This talk of games as literature for some reason brings to mind James Joyce, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I think of the Wandering Rocks section in Ulysses and how Joyce used a map and logical thinking--almost a game of Stratego, eh?--to schedule out the locations and whereabouts of the chapter's characters as they traverse through the center of Dublin. It also reminds me of that notion of Author as God---and player as God for video games like The Sims.

And of course Finnegans Wake is almost all a puzzle of linguistics that Joyce plays for the reader, offering very little solution.

Both of the books are, IMHO, precedents to our beloved HoL.

[fearful_syzygy]

Within games--is this right?--there's never any doubt as to rules, or else you can't play. Or if you don't know the rules, you still have to make some up as you go along (see Johnny's adding "water" to "heater").
I just have a very small point to add to this. I have never played Warhammer or the like, but I happen to know that Games Workshop publish supplementary rules and expansions on a monthly basis in the magazine White Dwarf, and I have overheard arguments and discussions of the various rules of the game based on incongruities in the various players' au fait-ness (if such a word exists) with the latest rules. In addition, these rules and expansions are written by different people and at times contradict each other, leaving it up to the players themselves to sort out the inconsistencies. This no doubt often leads to squabbles of an epic scale, far surpassing those at the Christmas family get-togethers where you discover that someone's lost the rules to Risk or Das ver-rückte Labyrinth (http://www.spieltrieb.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=344) since last year, and it's up to the bossiest person to assert that these are the rules as they remember them, and otherwise they're not playing... so there!

[OriginalIdea]

...I asked her if it has any "object." "It doesn't have one." "So--nobody 'wins' in the traditional sense? The game has no traditional 'end'?" "Well: your Sim can die; bad things can happen; but no."

Analyze this into either direction (for once I'm a little tired while reading), but I think The Sims can agree and disagree with this little side-point.

In The Sims, (or at least the first one) it was considered a goal to keep your Sim fed, rested, employed, and wealthy. Essentially, the more your Sim owned, the happier s/he was likely to be overall (you also had to keep them socially happy). The goal, really, was just to make lots of money; comparable to Monopoly, I think (obviously, however, in Monopoly there will eventually be a winner when only one player is not bankrupt). In The Sims (and I'm kind of writing as I think, here) the goal would seem to be to work toward and to live your "Happily Ever After." Exactly how you accomplish this doesn't matter, but anyhow... Of course, (as I've done several times) you can create Sims specifically to starve them to death or kill them in cruel ways (as I'm sure most people have done, but that topic is more for the psychological analysis), but then: I've acheived my goal. The Sim died. (It's really cool when they haunt each other.) Now, obviously, you can do whatever you want with your Sim, but the common goal (of happiness for you Sim) is pretty much acheived in only one way.

In The Sims 2, however, (or so I've read in reviews; I haven't actually played it) your Sim need not acheive happiness through wealth. If your goal is a mediocre lifestyle, your Sim can still be happy. Here again it's similar to its original, you can choose your goal, but now the common goal of Happiness doesn't have one solution.

Compare House of Leaves to either of these two. Both of the games depart from typical game goals. (Even Tetris where the only goal, really, was: "How far can you get?") In both The Sims and House of Leaves we have our own goals in mind. If you don't want to search for the inner meaning, then by simply reading everything within the book, cover to cover, you have acheived your goal.

(If you want to find out what happened to Johnny Truant, however, you must solve at least one puzzle and put XXI in proper chronological order. But perhaps this is how MZD lured others into the possible rewards of the even greater complexities of the rest of the book. If you didn't try to solve any of the others because you thought they would be too complicated, then by solving this one little puzzle, you might think there are others just as simple and attempt to locate them. HA! You're hooked.)

Whether House of Leaves is more like The Sims or The Sims 2 is arguable. I find myself going back and forth. But then, I (like a number of other people) think that was MZD's attempt: to make a puzzle for which you were never sure if you had the right solution. But in thinking this, have I actually solved it? (And now I'm just going in circles.)

I would also compare House of Leaves to the Photomosaic of Darth Vader I have hanging on my wall: Occasionally, I take another close look at it and find yet another one of the smaller pictures that I would swear I'd never noticed before.

[OriginalIdea]

Also: I found out about Eternal Darkness right about the same time I found out about House of Leaves so the two are forever connected in my head, what with walking Alex, Maximillion, or Edward through the Roivas mansion forever finding hidden things within it. Sound vaguely familiar? The bleeding paintings and constant pounding/knocking was also an enjoyable "driving me crazy" aspect of the game.

[Nash]

...phone numbers...it's always better to use 3, 5, or 7 chunks.

That's the way we do it too (chunking phone numbers in threes and fours), but I've noticed that the French do it in twos: where we'd tend to say 'six-one-five...five-five-five...nine-o-two-one', they would probably say: 'sixty-one, fifty-five, fifty-five, ninety, twenty-one. I don't know why this is exactly: could it be that the mind of the Frenchman is an alien entity that functions in ways incomprehensible to the rational, empirical Anglo-Saxon mind? Or is it just because their area codes are two-digit numbers, so it makes sense to chunk the rest in the same way?

Any French contributers care to comment?

We used to have 8 digits in a phone number until (more or less) 15 years ago, and now we have 10 digits to have more possibilities to create a new phone number because of our growing population (60 000 000 inhabitants).
When we had 8 digits, the two firsts were a code (but not very clear) for an area, I think it was also the case for the two after but for a smaller area. Besides, to phone at someone in Paris or in its suburbs (10 000 000 inhabitants) when we didn't live there, we had to add supplemental digits (generally three : "16 - 1").
With ten numbers, we added two digits at the former phone number which represent a code for a "big" region : "01" for Paris and its suburbs, "02" for North West, "03" for North East, "04" for South East, "05" for South West, "06" for a mobile phone, "08" for an overtaxed phone number. Now, all the phone numbers are 10 digits, except "green number", i.e. untaxed numbers.

So we are used to chunking in 2, I think because 8 well divided in 2, and because we had to add 2 new digits at our former phone number.
Practically, if we want to get the phone number of someone who live in the same town, we can know at least the 4 or 6 first digits of his phone number (except for a mobile).

[fearful_syzygy]

In Denmark it's the same. All phone numbers are eight digits, and they are spoken in four lots, i.e. twenty-seven, thirty-two, fifty-nine, sixty, for instance. Because of the stupid way Danes count (the worst imaginable combination of the French and German methods) this means that until you're absolutely fluent you have no chance of understanding anyone's phone number (or anything else for that matter), and phoning directory inquiries is out of the question.

Around here I haven't quite worked out the system yet (which might account for why I can never remember my own phone number), but essentially there is a three digit area code followed by another three digits and then two lots of two, like so: zéro vingt-et-un, deux cent quarante-cinq, huitante-trois, quatorze (for instance; I have no idea whose number that is, by the way).
That's how the Suisses Romands do it, at any rate, but it is entirely possible that the other regions have their very own systems.

Fascinating stuff, eh?

[John B.]

In The Sims 2, however, (or so I've read in reviews; I haven't actually played it) your Sim need not acheive happiness through wealth. If your goal is a mediocre lifestyle, your Sim can still be happy. Here again it's similar to its original, you can choose your goal, but now the common goal of Happiness doesn't have one solution.


This is true: My wife bought The Sims 2 for herself as an early Christmas present, and there are indeed slacker Sims . . . and at least a few "criminal-element" Sims (she has created a Sim who is a pickpocket). He, so far, seems perfectly content with his life. So, yes: "Happiness" in the cosmos that is The Sims 2 has a pretty broad definition.
Incidentally, there's a good bit in this game that isn't under the direct control of the player, which is pretty cool: "friends" of her Sims (whom my wife had not known of or created before) suddenly show up at the house; when Sims are on the computer, the name of the person they're talking to online will pop up on the screen; etc. So, the illusion of the characters' having a life outside the space the player is aware of--and, indeed, that that space itself has its own "life" independent of the player's actions--is very strong. I'm very ignorant, as I've said before, of computer games generally, so forgive me if the above sounds a bit wide-eyed.
But to connect all this to HoL (as per OriginalIdea's original idea), "happiness" will differ for the characters in TNR (and I mean not just Navy, Karen, et al., but also the various commentators on those characters and their actions that Zampano "cites"), for Zampano himself, for Johnny, the Editors . . . and for us readers. There are different narrative levels in the novel to which each character in the novel (and here I count the Editors as a character, since we--well, okay, some of us--feel compelled to account for the choices THEY make, as well) and we as readers respond--and identifying those threads is a subject for another thread, but we know what they are. Their and our responses are measures of (dis)satisfaction with our comprehension of the narrative we've chosen to focus on. Meanwhile, no matter our particular area of attention re the novel, we've all found that, inevitably, they intersect with those other threads--they're like fish hooked on other lines that get entangled with "our" line, complicating our comprehension. All that seems Sims-like to me.

[MoleculaRR]

Back to the questions of goals vs. "winnable-ness", there's an important (though often blown out of proportion) debate about whether The Sims is the same basic thing as, say, Doom 3.

As the name suggests, The Sims is first of all a simulation. The debate is sort of about whether simulations are the essence of games or whether narrative and goal-directed behavior are the essence of games. (It's generally called the "ludology vs. narratology" debate if you want to google it.)

I tend to think the whole debate is stupid, but I probably fall on the narratology side if I have to choose. So I agree that either Sims game offers a different sense of being organized around a goal, but I think that that redefinition of goal makes us talk about goals in a non-game-specific way. To say that The Sims lets you win (i.e. fulfill your personally defined goals) if your win-state is the violent death of your character is a bit like saying, "I won the game of my chair because my car because my goal for it was for it to let me drive it to work." The Sims-type games (including SimCity, SimAnt, SimWhatever-else-there-is) provide a rule structure that in some way mimic reality. So what the game provides isn't a narrative-like goal, it's a system of rules which emulate reality, but exist without the consequences of reality. The success of these games lies in their ability to let you do what you want within their emulated set of rules, so one way to think about a Sims game is like a tool. Making a tool do what it's designed to do (that is, perform a task within a user-directed goal framework) isn't the same thing as winning a game.

All that to say that I do agree there are phenomonological parallels between HoL and The Sims, but only in that the Sim model may be the closest thing to true interactivity that games can accomplish. As I was discussing (http://www.houseofleaves.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=47908&highlight=#47908) in the HoL Movie thread, I don't think HoL would benefit from being adapted as a game (the argument being that a game could be more interactive than a film) because it is significantly "interactive", more so than other books, which is why we're here.

I've compared it elsewhere to ARG's, but I like the way you put it, John B., Meanwhile, no matter our particular area of attention re the novel, we've all found that, inevitably, they intersect with those other threads--they're like fish hooked on other lines that get entangled with "our" line, complicating our comprehension. All that seems Sims-like to me.

I agree that it's Sims-like, but only if "Sims-like" also means "less-game-like."

[John B.]

I agree that it's Sims-like, but only if "Sims-like" also means "less-game-like."

That's what I meant, yes. That's why it's so hard to describe what HoL is "about." I'm just guessing here, but I suspect that most threads here are concerned with the events of TNR the film, if only because that is the part of the book that's easiest to discuss, that has the most direct narrative.

[OriginalIdea]

[The Navidson Record] is the part of the book that's easiest to discuss, that has the most direct narrative.
Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. Most people are discussing that, or the first few footnotes we read about Johnny; early in the beginning of the book, before his story gets all ... well, I'll say 'wiggy.' It all gets a bit heated toward the end, but TNR still holds a story that's fairly easy to follow. Pelafina's story is even harder, because she is/goes crazy and then dies.