Algorithms and Action

From Maze

Nick Montfort (2004) and Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008) have argued that a certain "screen essentialism" pervades new media studies, in which the "digital event on the screen," as Kirschenbaum puts it (4), becomes the sole object of study, at the expense of the underlying code, the hardware, the storage devices, and even the non-digital inputs and outputs that make the digital object possible in the first place. This volume seeks to avoid this ideology of the screen, even as it examines in a fine-grained fashion the on-screen output of a single program.

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 places the operator-machine and diegetic-nondiegetic categories onto two axes, forming a schema onto which it is possible to map a number of activities:

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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.

Moving on to the upper right quadrant, there are diegetic machine acts, what Galloway calls "pure processes" detached from the diegetic action. These are "ambient acts," machine-centric states in which the computer is running itself, with no input from the user (10). A screen saver is pure process, according to Galloway's model. Likewise, when the 10 Print program is running, what appears on the screen is a diegetic machine act.

In the lower left quadrant are nondiegetic operator acts or "subjective algorithms." These are the "acts of configuration" that take place outside of the game world but which contribute to gameplay, activities like hacks and cheats, setting up video and audio options, and even in Galloway's formulation, creating a character in RPGs (16). With a non-game program such as 10 Print, the act of configuration is entering the program itself at the command line.

Finally, in the lower right quadrant, there are nondiegetic machine acts. These are actions on the part of the machine that blur the boundary between the inside and outside of the game. Galloway gives these actions the Derridean name "play of the structure" for the impish way they violate the fourth wall of the game. The game over screen is perhaps the most common nondiegetic machine act, but far more interesting to Galloway is metalepsis, a kind of in-game meta-moment that acknowledges a world exists outside the game world. A famous example occurs in Metal Gear Solid, when the game advises the player that his or her videogame console has itself been compromised by the villain, and instructs the player to physically move the game controller from one port to another in order to circumvent the in-game boss’s power.

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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.

Consider how the program is actually executed on the Commodore 64. Typing in the maze program--whether as a one liner or expanded multiline program--is a nondiegetic operator act, the act of configuration. Even if the program had been saved onto a cassette or floppy disk drive, loading the program with, say,

LOAD “MAZE”,8

is still an act of configuration, a command entered in by the programmer and received by the machine. The final nondiegetic operator act is the command "run"; as soon as the programmer presses the <return> key, the action flips into Galloway's upper right quadrant, the diegetic machine act. The computer begins generating the design, slowing filling up the screen, line-by-line, without any further input from the operator--a pure process. The computer user can walk away at this point, and the machine will continue to run.

When the user tires of the endless random pattern, or wants to use the C64 for another purpose--perhaps playing a real maze game like Pac-Man, released on the Commodore 64 in 1983--he or she must press the <RUN/STOP> key, the C64's equivalent of the <ESC> key. This too is an act of configuration, an operator act that takes place outside the world created by the computer. The computer's response:

BREAK
READY

is a nondiegetic machine act, of the kind Galloway refers to as a "disabling act." An interruption and disruption to the flow--and in this case, endless looping--of the program, the disabling act has the power to "define the outer boundaries of aesthetics" and is "the degree zero for the entire medium" (31).

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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.

Works Cited

• Galloway, Alexander R. 2006. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Electronic mediations 18. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2008. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.
• Montfort, Nick. 2004. "Continuous Paper: The Early Materiality and Workings of Electronic Literature." MLA Convention. Philadelphia, PA, December 28. [1].