via SPLT/SCRN (NIME ‘23)
What it says
A game does what a score does. It supplies structure, constraint, randomness and visual feedback, and the performers improvise inside it. The music is not written in advance and it is not free — it emerges from playing the game. The mechanics are the notation.
Does it hold for my work
This is the concept that converts my interest in games from a subject into a method. It lets me claim that interaction rules are not there to make the piece enjoyable — they are the structural skeleton of the experience, doing the job notation does elsewhere.
That is a strong claim, and it is the one that makes the game engine as instrument a research position rather than a technical preference.
Where it does not reach me
SPLT/SCRN’s performers are trained musicians. A score only works as a score for someone who can read one. My whole direction is an ordinary person holding a controller — no training, no rehearsal, no shared notation practice.
So the concept transfers only if I can show that a game’s rules are legible without training in a way a score is not. Which is close to the argument I want to make anyway: the tacit knowledge of knowing what a gamepad is for is the training, already distributed, already in the audience’s hands.
Under v4
Multiple strangers, one score. That is closer to an ensemble than to a solo — and SPLT/SCRN is a two-performer piece, so the material is there.