Algorithms and Action

Among the approaches to the 10 Print program that shift the focus away from the visual design itself is Alexander Galloway's model of four gamic actions (2006). Galloway proposes this model as a means for understanding videogames, but it is equally applicable to any kind of digital event produced by algorithmic processes. Borrowing from the language of cybernetics, Galloway first distinguishes between the operator's actions and the machine's actions. In a videogame, for example, there are the actions of the player and the actions of the machine. Or, more apropos to the context of 10 Print, there are the actions executed by the user, such as typing in a program, and the actions executed by the computer, such as running that program. Next, and again borrowing his terminology, this time from film studies, Galloway distinguishes between diegetic and nondiegetic acts. In videogames the diegetic space is the game world in which the narrative action takes place, but more generally, the diegetic space is the on-screen environment generated by a running program. In the case of 10 Print, the maze on the screen is the diegetic act of the program. Nondiegetic acts occur in the space that is "external to the world of narrative action" (7). In a game this might be a pause screen or a heads-up display. For a simpler piece of code such as 10 Print, the command line, where a user types in the program could be considered the nondiegetic space--the space outside the program itself.

Galloway explains each of the four quadrants, and while his detours into Derrida and deconstructionism are not necessarily useful for understanding 10 Print, his larger argument is instructive. Beginning in the top left corner, Galloway calls diegetic operator acts the "dromenon," a word that comes from the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga's foundational 1938 book ''Homo Ludens''. Literally meaning "something acted," the dromenon describes what "playing a videogame" usually means: in-game movement, in-game puzzle-solving, in-game expression, actually doing something in the imaginary world on the screen.

Galloway's model has its shortcomings (to be addressed in a footnote), not the least of which is its game-centric underpinnings. Even so, the idea of four actions reveals several characteristics of the 10 Print program that are, on the one hand, completely obvious, but on the other hand, so obvious as to be entirely overlooked. In other words, thinking about 10 Print in terms of the operator-machine axis and the diegetic-nondiegetic axis defamiliarizes the program, allowing new insights into its operation.

Looking at 10 Print through Galloway's model makes one thing absolutely clear: there is no dromenon. There is no way to "play" the maze while the program is running. This fact has a number of implications, most notably is a radical failure of the ideology of the screen described earlier. Alongside this screenocentric logic another myth of modern computing falls away: interactivity. Or rather, interactivity--the feedback loop between human and machine--isn’t where one would expect to find it. It’s not in the playing of the game, the solving of the maze, it’s in the coding of the program, it’s latent in the beckoning flash of the command line cursor.