From: SPLT/SCRN (NIME ‘23). Comes paired with a companion concept, friction as feature.
Originally for: performances that need structure without fixing what happens.
What it says
Game mechanics can do what a score does: supply rules, constraint, randomness and visible feedback, inside which performers improvise. The music emerges from playing the game rather than from reading notation.
Friction as feature is the same insight from the other side. The tension between winning and making it sound good is not a bug to design out — the resistance is the experience. This is the same logic as the deliberate unfairness in A Fair Game?.
How it holds up on my work
Fitted to Phosphor, and it explains what the three mapping principles are doing: architecture → reverb, vegetation → tempo, gaze → harmony are not a control scheme, they are a score written as rules about a place.
It also supplies the argument I need if the thesis claims that rules are the structural skeleton of an experience rather than a way to make it fun.
Tolerance issue: SPLT/SCRN’s performers are trained musicians who can hear when a rule is producing a bad outcome. Mine are not. Whether a game can be a score for someone with no musical ear is exactly the load this part has not yet been tested under.