Early Computer Game Design and the Pleasure of Pragmatic Systems

Jack Burnham drew evidence for a new aesthetic of systems from military planning operations, citing work by E.S. Quade at RAND. Importantly, Quade explicitly differentiated his systems approach at RAND from systems science by focusing on the pragmatic aspects of model building, testing, and evaluation. Military roleplaying games were the central method for integrating computers and humans in elaborate simulations, and as these games spread beyond the military they generated new aesthetic concerns while spreading systems thinking through vectors of business, management, regional development, and city planning. In this paper I use Jack Burnham’s writing to think about the sources of a pragmatic systems analysis as already involved in the questions that his art historical examples point to. In particular, I look at some of the first games to formulate design as a problem by Quade, Frank Ricciardi, Richard Duke, and Buckminster Fuller. By examining these works in the light of Jack Burnahm’s work and thinking about aesthetics as an inherent dimension of system analysis, I argue that we can better understand the elements of play and game that connect the artists Burnham cites to new media artists using games today.